RSS
Subscribe to Project Activity via RSS
Overview
You can subscribe to the appointments table using feed readers like Newsgator.
This can be a great way to keep track of new project activity without having to keep FileMaker open. You can create specific URLs to subscribe to just one project's activity, or just one user's activity. Some folks call this Management by Feeds
Below you can see one phase of a project from SeedCodeComplete shown in NewsFire.
Live Demo
If you'd like to see how this feels try our in your favorite reader like Newsgator or Safari. This demo is password protected and not all free rss readers can authenticate into a feed. You'll use the following login:
Password: demo
This demo is searching for unread activity on the project named "Sample Project One".
Requirements
The ability to subscribe to the calendar in this way is built into the Pro Versions of SeedCode Calendar. It does require the XML publishing capabilities of FileMaker Server Advanced, however.
Set Up
To begin with you'll need to make sure that one of your privilege sets is set up with the fmxml and fmxslt extended privileges enabled. You may want to create a special privilege set for just this purpose: one that doesn't have any edit rights to your files.
Once those extended privileges are turned on for SeedCodeComplete, load the file on to your FileMaker Server Advanced (FMS8) or FileMaker Server (FMS9).
Create a folder called RSS inside this folder on your FileMaker Server: "FileMaker Server X / Web Publishing / xslt-template-files /", then place the file SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl which came with SeedCodeComplete inside that folder.
To test this out, try the basic URL below (substituting the IP of your server for "YourServersIP").
Sample URLs
Basic...
feed://YourServersIP:80/fmi/xsl/rss/SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl?-db=SeedCodeComplete&-lay=Appointment%20Table&-find&-grammar=fmresultset
Search for User "JS"...
feed://YourServersIP:80/fmi/xsl/rss/SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl?-db=SeedCodeComplete&-lay=Appointment%20Table&ApptUser_kf=JS&-find&-grammar=fmresultset
Search for Project "My Project" (note how the space is encoded with %20 in the URL)...
feed://YourServersIP:80/fmi/xsl/rss/SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl?-db=SeedCodeComplete&-lay=Appointment%20TablepptProjects::ProjectName=My%20Project&-find&-grammar=fmresultset
Search for items greater than or equal to July 15, 2003...
feed://YourServersIP:80/fmi/xsl/rss/SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl?-db=SeedCodeComplete&-lay=Appointment%20Table&ApptDateStart_k=07/15/2003&ApptDateStart_k.op=gt&-find&-grammar=fmresultset
For more information about searching for specific types of records, read "Appendix A Valid Names Used in Query Strings" in the fmsa8_custom_web_guide.pdf available from FileMaker's download page.
Troubleshooting
If you're having trouble getting this to work in your files, double check some of these items.