Raghu's SharePoint Corner: JQUERY RSSReader WebPart for Office365

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August 5, 2011

JQUERY RSSReader WebPart for Office365


It’s been long time I have posted any technical posts. This post would describe an alternate for RSS Reader Web part in Office 365. Last week I started to work on one of our client’s requirement to show RSS feed in Office 365. For surprise I came across few posts which indicated RSS Viewer Web Part is not supported.

To start my research first I tried with RSS Reader Web part present in CodePlex written by phil wicklund. If you try to deploy this solution on cloud it would through error because of few limitations that I had posted here in my previous post.

So I started to Google to check how to display RSS feeds in ASP.net which doesn’t use any web part concept. I ended up with This post. With the help of the above two posts I started creating JQUERY RSS Reader web part for office 365.

After completing the development of the base web part, I thought it would be great if can render the rss feeds as ticker instead of static. So I ended up in creating the following display mode 1. Basic and  2.Ticker which can be configured to render feeds accordingly. Here are some snapshots of the configuration and how the web part looks.



Please find below the source code and the WSP for this web part now. Please feel free to modify this webpart according to your needs and let me know if you have any better solution.

10 comments:

Sohaib Khan said...

Hi,

Your logic works absolutely fine when i deployed it in SharePoint 2010 as a Sandbox Solution.

But, the same solution doesn't work on our SharePoint Online Site. It deploys and activates fine without any error. I also added it on my page without any error. But, It doesn't show any rss feed.

Do you know the reason ?

Thanks

Unknown said...

Hi Sohaib,

I have tested this on SharePoint Online Site. It worked. Make sure that you provide a proper rss feed in the feed url. You will get an JavaScript prompt/error while loading the page on which the webpart is placed (due to accessing data from different site). I don't remember correctly if you need to click either Yes/no to show the rss content. you can try both of the option once.

Sohaib Khan said...

Hello Raghavendra,

The solution works fine for me now. It was not connecting with the correct scripts before.

There are 2 problems which are minor level.

1- RSS Feed starts repeating after sometime in Chrome & Firefox BUT not in IE.

2- Feature activation doesn't check-in the javascript files in Style Library in SharePoint Online. (I tried the same Sandbox solution on SharePoint Enterprise 2010 and it checks-in itself). Due to this, site admin needs to check-in after deployment to show to all users.

Thanks

Unknown said...

Thanks for the inputs. I have not tested for Chrome or Firefox and i think i had developed this for team site, which didnt require checkin. Anyways will test and update the solution as time permits.. Glad to know that it worked :)

Mike Knapp said...

Can the RSS be passed by a parameter? That was we can use a list to populate it.

Unknown said...

@Mike Knapp.
Yes I think you should be able to achieve that. Instead of a text field you can also have a dropdown control with all the rss feeds and select appropriate rss feed on a page.

Don Draper said...

Hi,
i'm deeply interested by your technique but i dont really get how you implement it within office 365. Do you have a step by step explaining how to deploy it?

thx a lot

-Sam

Unknown said...

Hi Sam,

you can download the source code and the wsp from the download link provided in the post at the end.
For deploying follow these steps.
1. Navigate to root site. Navigate ->Site Actions>Site Settings->Galleries->Solutions.
2. Upload the Solution
3. Activate the solution, the web part will be available the Web part Gallery. If not activate the feature.

Thanks & Regards
Raghavendra Shanbhag

Brett said...

There seems to be conflict if I add your Web Part more than once on a web-part page. Are you able to provide a fix for this?

Unknown said...

Hi Brett,

yup you are right, i didnt work on this scenario.. and currently i dont have a fix for this.