Mashups and Microsoft SharePoint Part 1.3: SharePoint Consuming Presto Published RSS

This is the third in a many-part series about Mashups and Microsoft SharePoint.  You can read about the entire series at http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/mashing-sharepoint-introduction.

There are a number of RSS Feed categories published by Presto Enterprise Mashup Server:

1. Presto Platform Feeds
   

   A number of standard platform feeds are published by Presto providing summary status of Presto published services, such as recently published services, top rated services etc.

2. Presto Published RSS Feeds
   

   Syndication data formats RSS and ATOM are supported by Presto.

   Presto also supports a number of authentication protocols such as NTLM, Basic Auth and SSL.

   By default Presto supports the transformation of Published Syndicated Services into a single unified format.

3. Presto Mashup Generated RSS

   A Presto Mashups can be designed to output its data in the form of an RSS Feed.

Presto Platform Feeds

The Presto Platform Feeds are intended to be used to monitor various service related activity such as

• top rated presto services
• recently published services

These platform feeds require username/password authentication to be included in the feed URL.

Presto Published RSS Feeds

The User documentation states the following:

Currently, you can only publish syndication services that use one of the two syndication standards (RSS or Atom) as a Presto RSS serivce. Services that use the alternate format must be published as REST services.

The format that Presto accepts for a syndication service is defined in Mashup Server configuration. By default, Presto is configured to publish and normalize syndication services using the RSS standard.

Any Syndicated Service published in Presto can be accessed via a Presto URL. If the Syndicated Service is authenticated then Presto can handle the authentication. Details in the user documentation on how to publish here:

http://www.jackbe.com/prestodocs/v2.6.1/prestolibrary/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?href=PrestoLibrary.1.55.html

Mashup Generated RSS

Presto Mashups can be designed to output data in the form of an RSS Feed.

• A single RSS Feed might be filtered.
• One or more RSS feeds might be combined to generate a merged RSS Feed.
• A Feed might be decorated with data from an non-RSS service data input, but the output retaining the RSS form.
• One or more non-RSS services might be mashed and the FormatAsRSS Wires Action/EMML Command used to reform the output in the form of an RSS Feed.

The FormatAsRSS Wires Action is not yet released as part of the standard product and must be downloaded and manually installed. Instructions are provided here :

Create RSS Feed From Any Service Output

SharePoint RSS Viewer

The standard SharePoint RSS Viewer is capable of displaying a variety of Syndication data formats including:

• RSS
• ATOM & ATOM2
• RDF

Configuring the RSS Viewer Web Part simply requireds the Presto published feed URL to be entered in the RSS Properties Section of the Edit panel, see snapshot. The Web Part also allows the following to be configured:

• the number of displayed items can be controlled.
• Whether to show title and description.

The Miscellaneous property section provides options to enable a timeout on the caching of the feed data.

Data View Properties provides the option to edit and customize the XSL Stylesheet used to transform the feed into readable hypertext, for example adding the display of some extended set of parameter data.

This post is part of a many-part series about Mashups and Microsoft SharePoint.  You can read about the entire series at http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/mashing-sharepoint-introduction.