Question

I am hoping this is possible.

What I am doing is using the Facebook PHP SDK and the Social Graph API to retrieve posts from a page and refreshing it every x millseconds but this is a bit of waste of resources if the content is exactly the same so I was wanting to only do the refresh is the content has changed.

<div id="bottom-bar">
    <?php require("graph.php"); ?>
</div>

<script>
var auto_refresh = setInterval(
function ()
{
    $('#bottom-bar').fadeOut("slow").load('graph.php').fadeIn("slow");
}, 30000); // refresh every 30000 milliseconds
</script>

So, graph.php has the massive array that is returned by the page and I am taking out the data I want etc but is there a way to only do it if it’s different than before?

Thanks for all your help,

Answer 1

thanks for your help, managed to get it with the following code so if anyone runs into this situation then hopefully it’s of some use to you:

<script>
var cacheData;
var data = $('#bottom-bar').html();
var auto_refresh = setInterval(
function ()
{
    $.ajax({
        url: 'graph.php',
        type: 'POST',
        data: data,
        dataType: 'html',
        success: function(data) {
            if (data !== cacheData){
                //data has changed (or it's the first call), save new cache data and update div
                cacheData = data;
                $('#bottom-bar').fadeOut("slow").html(data).fadeIn("slow");
            }           
        }
    })
}, 30000); // check every 30000 milliseconds
</script>