automate Auto Refresh test(s)

[LeeDr]

Describe the feature: We recently had regressions that broke Auto Refresh #20813

Describe a specific use case for the feature: We need automated tests for this important feature.

It should test Auto Refresh at a minimum on either Discover, Visualize, or Dashboard.

I think we'll have to create some new data loading method so that we can load data for a short period of time before and after now. This shouldn't require a lot of data. Potentially only a few docs would be enough.
Then go to Discover on that index, enable auto refresh at 5 second interval, get the hit count, wait 5 or 6 seconds, get the hit count again and verify it changed (or some other value appears or disappears from the results).

Testing on a dashboard would be great too since that could cover both Saved Searches and as many visualizations as we can verify.

[LeeDr]

I guess there's a couple more auto refresh cases that are important.

With a fixed timespan (absolute selection in time picker), enable auto refresh and add more data to the index. This could have 2 variations, one where it's a time-based index, and another which is not time-based (timepicker isn't used on non-time-based indices).

[timroes]

We should definitely test Discover and Visualize/Dashboard, since they use completely different mechanisms, so as in the above linked ticket, you can easily only break one of those.

Adding more data and waiting for that to load would actually be the ideal case. I think what would already be a good start (and would have caught that above issue), if we create an index pattern, that has a scripted field return System.currentTimeMillis(), which would always point to the current milliseconds. That way we could: render a chart, check that value and store it, wait the configured auto refresh timeout, check, that the chart now has a higher value in that field, which means it refreshed.

Though the way better approach for the long run should be: testing this on two different types of indexes (time-based and not) in at least Visualize and Discover app, but ideally also in Dashboard, containing both of them.

[stratoula]

Thank you for contributing to this issue, however, we are closing this issue due to inactivity as part of a backlog grooming effort. If you believe this feature/bug should still be considered, please reopen with a comment.