question on iphone web page- status not updating?

[KurtL]

Hello- New Envisalink user. Great little product, install was a snap on my Vista 20p panel.

I got this mainly for the family so they could arm / disarm the home alarm in an easier manner. While easy to use, there seems to be one major shortcoming- when you arm or disarm the alarm the page does not reflect the status automatically- you have to wait and keep hitting manual refresh until it shows the correct status. However, it does automatically display a command string in a light yellow box at top- not sure if that is a sent command from the Eyezon web page or a received response from the Envisalink.

Either way- this page really needs to auto update in connection with a sent command. This should not be hard to do in regards to coding- when hitting arm or disarm, have the web page app wait for the response back from the Envisalink, then display the status. Sure it may take 10-15 seconds for the update but that would be strongly preferred.

Not talking about doing an "auto refresh" of the page which would keep eating up cell data, just talking about doing a more intelligent send function from the web page in where it also does a Get request and waits for a response from the alarm panel pushed by Envisalink. I'm kind of wondering why the local page on the Envisalink hardware does this but the web page through Eyezon does not. Although the local web page is doing it via simple page refresh mechanism.

Also too it would be great if the configured notifications in your Eyezon portal had an option to "send to web page" so it updates the Eyezon web application's page if a selected monitored status is sent out. For example, I get a text message that a disarm occurred, I open the web page, and it still shows "armed". That to me seems very odd, since you have the system in place to send notifications out to text or email, but not to your Eyezon web page.

Second question- is there a way to modify the local web page function options on the Envisalink? There is no option to set "Stay" arm, the only available arm option is "Away" - which seems a bit silly since the local web page is well.. local? I had hoped to be able to publish the local web page on my various ipad-based controllers throughout the house, giving a local method of arm / disarm when at home. but not being able to access Stay mode (or a custom mode) really limits its use.

Last suggestion- have ability to rename the status messages. For example, wife receives a text "Closing by User Code 2", would be nice to be able to rename these to "System manually armed by Jane" - In a similar method to how you allow the Zone descriptors to be modified.

Thanks!

[KurtL]

No one? If this is not the right forum for support, please let me know.

[bickyb]

I agree with you, we really need a local API to enable STAY mode.

[bickyb]

This is really why I think Envisalink needs to provide an Iphone app as opposed to this web page stuff. An iphone app should be able to send you app push alerts that the alarm has been triggered.
Further, it should refresh status on its own.
I find the web page very archaic.

[KurtL]

I work in tech and develop software. it can be a web page, it just depends how the web page is designed and how their server-side software is designed. this can all be done very easily without an app- the question here seems more of effort and pride in product / services. But hey it's not like we can buy a competing product that does the same thing, so there's probably no motivation on their part to make it work like it should / shame. (competition unfortunately is the best motivator to keep feature sets current) - and not even a support response.

[GrandWizard]

Hello- New Envisalink user. Great little product, install was a snap on my Vista 20p panel.

I got this mainly for the family so they could arm / disarm the home alarm in an easier manner. While easy to use, there seems to be one major shortcoming- when you arm or disarm the alarm the page does not reflect the status automatically- you have to wait and keep hitting manual refresh until it shows the correct status. However, it does automatically display a command string in a light yellow box at top- not sure if that is a sent command from the Eyezon web page or a received response from the Envisalink.

Commands have to be queued as they piggy-back on supervisory packets which run every 30 seconds. The yellow box just tells you that it is still in queue.

Either way- this page really needs to auto update in connection with a sent command. This should not be hard to do in regards to coding- when hitting arm or disarm, have the web page app wait for the response back from the Envisalink, then display the status. Sure it may take 10-15 seconds for the update but that would be strongly preferred.

Not talking about doing an "auto refresh" of the page which would keep eating up cell data, just talking about doing a more intelligent send function from the web page in where it also does a Get request and waits for a response from the alarm panel pushed by Envisalink. I'm kind of wondering why the local page on the Envisalink hardware does this but the web page through Eyezon does not. Although the local web page is doing it via simple page refresh mechanism.

It used to have an auto-refresh until we got the usage bill from our data centre .

The local web page can do a quick auto refresh as there is no latency between commands being executed and status. On the portal side, depending on what you're doing, there could be as much as 1 minute latency.

Also too it would be great if the configured notifications in your Eyezon portal had an option to "send to web page" so it updates the Eyezon web application's page if a selected monitored status is sent out. For example, I get a text message that a disarm occurred, I open the web page, and it still shows "armed". That to me seems very odd, since you have the system in place to send notifications out to text or email, but not to your Eyezon web page.

That's not possible unless you're looking at an old version of the page. This would be the same for both DSC and Honeywell. Partition status always leads events.

Second question- is there a way to modify the local web page function options on the Envisalink? There is no option to set "Stay" arm, the only available arm option is "Away" - which seems a bit silly since the local web page is well.. local? I had hoped to be able to publish the local web page on my various ipad-based controllers throughout the house, giving a local method of arm / disarm when at home. but not being able to access Stay mode (or a custom mode) really limits its use.

Are you talking about Honeywell? If so I think that is changed in the next firmware release.

Last suggestion- have ability to rename the status messages. For example, wife receives a text "Closing by User Code 2", would be nice to be able to rename these to "System manually armed by Jane" - In a similar method to how you allow the Zone descriptors to be modified.

Thanks!

Yep, right where you set up Zone Labels, you can also set up User Labels and Partition Labels.

[KurtL]

Thanks for the reply- Your public secure web page for iphone does not have to rely on page refresh to obtain status from a sever-based system. There are many APIs and client / server web architectures that can be used to "listen" for events and then push the notification. I hate to say it but using web page refresh (GET / POST) to poll for events is like 15 years old.
HTML5 also includes a provision for this natively: http://html5hacks.com/blog/2013/04/21/p ... nt-events/, assuming your back end is not limited in design. As a theoretical example, your cloud servers listen for events from the Envisalink hardware modules. An event (status change etc) is received by the Envisalink module from the alarm unit, and sent to the cloud server. the cloud server pushes this updated event to the iphone web page, which is also listening for events- It is not doing a "page refresh" and sucking up bandwidth indescriminately. If this type of web technology did not exist in an easy to implement and non-bandwidth sucking manner, many iphone apps and social media sites would be out of business. A lot of iphone apps that connect to back end systems are nothing more than glorified web pages wrapped in an app shell- in most cases an "app" is not needed for relay of events to a web page. Sigalert.com is a good (although more complex) example.

The system is a Vista 20p - looking forward to the new firmware update if it will include "Stay" command on the local device web page.

[bickyb]

Grandwizard,
I have a DSC unit. Are there plans to allow for a local quick api call for a STAY ARM command in an upcoming firmware release?

[GrandWizard]

For DSC modules if you arm via the local page it will arm in Stay already. Assuming you don't breach an exit zone during exit delay.