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Scanner Data & Metadata ​

Scanner Role ​

The Scanner is a component of the Chrome Extension that scan the webpages browsed by the user for search terms and enable report interaction. To configure this Scanner, Uplink needs a structure containing analyses drivers and conditions, as well as the list of values for the search terms. This is what we call scanner data and metadata.

Scanner Data & Metadata ​

The Scanner Data & Metadata is structured information generated from the Scanner Definition and Synonyms. The Uplink service will query the Power BI dataset to build this structure.

We query the following values from the Power BI dataset:

  • The values of columns specified for each analysis and synonyms in Scanner Definition and Synonyms.
  • If using the Dataset Approach for Metadata specification, all the content in the tables scanner_definition and scanner_synonyms.

The Scanner Metadata configures how the Chrome extension scans the content of a web page to detect terms that match values in a Power BI semantic model, enabling contextual popup display and report filtering.

The Scanner Data is the column data extracted from the Power BI dataset, according to the Scanner Metadata specifications.
Values of these columns will be the words the Chrome extension searches to mark and enable interactivity. These values are called Search Terms.

Scanner Data Caching ​

To avoid flooding the Power BI dataset (and your capacities) with queries on each new page opened by each user, we cache this data at two levels:

  • On each user's device
  • On our servers

When a user opens a new web page, the extension will try to retrieve the scanner data in the order described below, going to the following step if the current cache is empty or invalid:

  1. Get the values from the local cache on the user's device
  2. Get the values from the server cache
  3. Get the values from the Power BI dataset through the Power BI API

INFO

Scanner data refreshes initiated from the back-end interface or our API will always query the dataset through the Power BI API and import new values (thus updating the server cache).