RSS feed of New Items List
Submitted by gi06 on Thu, 2007-11-08 14:14.
Hello
We currently have a very basic New Items prepared search which we are thinking of splitting into subject areas. We would like this information to be presented in the student portal so that students can see which new items are available for their particular course. Anyone done something like this?
RSS Feed of new items list
Hello, I wanted to do this as well. At the moment I run a report in Business Objects and have the order fund name as an index. I then save this as html and add a link to the document from the RSS feed page. At the moment I'm updating this weekly so it's not too labour intensive.
RSS is certainly possible...
Hi,
This could be possible using a scripting approach. I once wrote a simple shell script which embedded output of a SQL query in a html document.
It should be possible to do a similar thing using RSS.
You would need to decide which flavour of RSS to use, then use an existing feed as a template, making sure that all dates etc were changed each time the list was run. (otherwise there would never be anything new in the feed!)
Essentially the script echoed this template to the output file, and then in the area of the feed that each item would display, the following SQL was used. (the -b and -h-1 switches force no output of header or dashed lines).
isql -Usa -P -b -h-1 -w 100 <<-END >>/users/report/hfoutput/video/Video_List.out
use prod_talis
go
set nocount on
select ""
+ substring(W.TITLE_DISPLAY, 1, charindex(" [", W.TITLE_DISPLAY))
+ right(W.TITLE_DISPLAY, char_length(W.TITLE_DISPLAY)-charindex("]", W.TITLE_DISPLAY) )
+ " "
+ W.AUTHOR_DISPLAY
+ ""
+ C.CLASS_NUMBER
+ ""
from ITEM I, CLASSIFICATION C, WORKS W
where C.CLASS_ID = I.CLASS_ID and I.WORK_ID = W.WORK_ID
and ((C.CLASS_NUMBER = 'Videocassette') or (C.CLASS_NUMBER = 'DVD')) and I.STATUS_ID != 108
order by C.CLASS_NUMBER, W.TITLE_DISPLAY
go
END
This as you can see, wrote out a html row for each item returned by the query. You could use it as a guide to writing your own SQL. If you need to know what the stored procedure in the database is doing to return the new items search, you can view this in Webmin.
The shell script went on to write the footer of the html page, and then would FTP it to the prism servers so that it was available in a pre arranged place, and email a report to an interested observer ;).
Hope this is of use.
Tim
-----------------------------------
Tim Hodson
Support Analyst
Talis
tim.hodson@talis.com
www.timhodson.com
informationtakesover.co.uk (blog)