/api/broadcast lets you temporarily put something on all screens.

[cjbest]

It's nice to be able to have an integration say "put this on every screen everywhere for the next 30 seconds" for exceptional events/etc. Hope this approximates a sane way to get that done.

Awesome project by the way :)

[vincentbernat]

The feature is interesting. I would expect it to be implemented by promoting a group as a broadcast group. All active receivers would switch to this group. This is not as easy as your implementation but it would allow to reuse most of the existing web interface and to easily handle additional attributes to dashboards (size, timeout). We also get less edge cases. For example, we don't have to handle anything particular for when the original group is modified and we don't have to handle a "broadcast" event, just regular events.

A way to minimize code needed for implementation would be to save the previous group somewhere and have a function to restore it. This way, you would be able to iterate over all displays and put them into the broadcast group and when the period is finished, undo each display still in the broadcast group. This won't result in a single API call but I suppose that you currently don't issue the call by hand but through a script? We could add API call if needed for that, it's just they will just trigger a serie of sub calls instead of trying to do something specific.

[cjbest]

I can see how that would be cleaner.

I'm definitely using this as an integration point hit by other systems. Hit /broadcast to temporarily put stuff on every screen. Using it for stuff like "let everybody know that lunch is here." Would probably be annoying if You were using the interface, and a transient message caused everything to move around. Conversely, if switching something in the UI tramples a broadcast, no big deal.

Anyway, I'm pretty swamped right now but I might take another crack in the future if I get time and this is interesting to you. For now It's working great for my purposes :)

[DisasteR]

Wil be nice to have multiple broadcast groups with different receivers.

[tlourey]

This would be an excellent feature