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:

AccountName: seedcoderss
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.

Not all RSS readers understand authentication (needing to log in) so you may want to try your site in the trial version of another reader if you're not being asked for a username and password.

Make sure you're logging into the databases with a privilege set that has the fmxml and fmxslt extended privilege set enabled in the SeedCodeCalendar file.

Be sure any field referenced in your URL are on the layout named in your URL and that the field names haven't changed. There are also two field names specified in the SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl file; make sure these haven't changed.

Double check that XSLT publishing ie enabled in your copy of FileMaker Server Advanced and that SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl is inside the following folder structure:

FileMaker Server 7/Web Publishing/xslt-template-files/rss

To control the appearance for your data in the RSS feed remember that we're really only showing two fields in the RSS feed: ApptTitle and ApptTitleDisplayCalc. The latter of these is the real work horse and in our demo we've modified it to show the data and time at the beginning of the string. Now this field is doing a LOT of other things in SeedCode Complete and you may not want to mess with it. So you can create a new field that formats the appointment information the way you'd like and use that in the RSS instead. If you do this be sure to add the field to the Appointment Table layout AND edit the SeedCodeCalendar_RSS.xsl file, replacing the one instance of ApptTitleDisplayCalc with your new field name.