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DnR for Creating and Publishing RSS feeds?

OctavianMH

Hey all,

Is Deploy and Run the appropriate method for creating an RSS feed and deploying it to production, all in one automated, timed task?

In other words.. the DnR task would:
1) Execute tpl file that recreates the feed
2) Deploy (and version, i guess) that file to production

While I vaguely understand how DnR works, I haven't found the example XML files and/or documention to be nearly as helpful as I'm hoping (it's great with compicated stuff, but i'm not doing anything complicated..). Could someone provide a quick XML skeleton of the DnR script required to make this happen? I'm just looking for a place to start, hopefully I can muck around and get it all to work myself. Smiley Happy

Thanks in advance,
matt

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Dwayne

You probably could, but I can't say it would be my preferred way to do it. If you want to version the RSS feed itself, as well as the content, I'd probably steer you in the direction of workflow, rather than a DnR. But then, that tends to be my bias anyway.

Now, if you don't want to keep the RSS feed inside TeamSite, but just build it on the production server, a DnR that runs on the target server would make more sense.

Which ever method you choose, just keep in mind that you'll probably want the RSS feed to contain the most recent 'n' files deployed to production. The problem is, you may only be deploying one or two in any given deployment. So your code will have to keep some form of state information from one run to the next, perhaps by reading the prior feed.

As far as code samples are concerned, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "a quick XML skeleton of the DnR script" The script won't be XML. It will be code written in some programming language, like Perl, Java, or whatever you're comfortable with.

Adam Stoller

Hey all,

Is Deploy and Run the appropriate method for creating an RSS feed and deploying it to production, all in one automated, timed task?

In other words.. the DnR task would:
1) Execute tpl file that recreates the feed
2) Deploy (and version, i guess) that file to production

While I vaguely understand how DnR works, I haven't found the example XML files and/or documention to be nearly as helpful as I'm hoping (it's great with compicated stuff, but i'm not doing anything complicated..). Could someone provide a quick XML skeleton of the DnR script required to make this happen? I'm just looking for a place to start, hopefully I can muck around and get it all to work myself.

Thanks in advance,
matt

To add to Dwayne's comments - if you want to do this as a DNR - you will want to use a DnrDeploymentJob script that runs on the source server, before the deployment, to do the page generation stuff into a directory of your choosing, and then have the deployment do (hopefully) a comparison deployment to your RSS drop-off directory - and you'd want the entire deployment to be kicked off with a unique '-inst' parameter so that if it happens to get invoked multiple times before completing, it will still work.

I think trying to do this all in a DNR is a bit overly streamlined, and doing it in a workflow may be overkill (unless you want a review process in place for the content that is going to be fed to the RSS?). The middle-ground would be a script that polls a given source directory for new files to process and then, upon finding new files, does the processing on the source side and then invokes the deployment.

The script could be run via cron (on Unix) or the windows scheduler (on Windows) or could even be your own perpetually running process (on either platform).

The above is all medium-high level information - I don't know the details of creating / maintaining RSS feeds, nor your specific requirements for so doing - but hopefully between Dwayne's and this response you'll have sufficient information to go on.

OctavianMH

Thanks for the replies, let me explain a little more fully.

One of our website's main components is upcoming events, lots of them, which are currently stored in DCRs and a database. As they change frequently, but are teamsite intensive workflows, I don't want to muddy the waters by attaching the RSS tpl to run when _any_ event is changed, I just want to run it once a day.. The tpl queries the database, retrieves the upcoming week's worth of events, and then steps over the returned DCRs (by id, contained in their filename), building the RSS-formatted XML file. I then, of course, want to deploy the resulting file. I want this to happen daily.

Now, sure, a cron job where I execute the tpl, and then run a deploy job would do it, but I was hoping to do this the 'proper' way (whatever that means), and assumed (and was told by a TS dev friend of mine) that using DnR was the proper TS way of going about it.

But, if a cron job is just as valid and will do the job.. heck. Smiley Happy

I guess I should look into the command line tools docs to figure out how to deploy via the command line..

Dwayne

Given that scenario, I'd probably go ahead and do the building of the RSS file from your cron job. Doing it from a DnR is just making it more complex than it needs to be, in my opinion.

You'll want to look at iwodstart to invoke the deployment, and you may want to look at iwsubmit CLT if you want to version the RSS file.

Adam Stoller

Given that scenario, I'd probably go ahead and do the building of the RSS file from your cron job. Doing it from a DnR is just making it more complex than it needs to be, in my opinion.

You'll want to look at iwodstart to invoke the deployment, and you may want to look at iwsubmit CLT if you want to version the RSS file.

If you're using OD 5.6 SP1 or higher (i.e. OD 6.x) - you really should be using iwodcmd start not iwodstart.

As for cron vs DNR - if you're planning to do a filelist deployment - the cron script process will probably be far easier. If you're doing a directory comparison deployment - I think cron is still easier, but you might be able to do the dnrDeploymentJob thing I mentioned previously.

I don't think there's any one absolute 'right' way to do this - but for an automated process that's supposed to run at regular intervals - it kind of makes sense to use well established systems (like cron) unless the application-provided system provides significant added-value. In this case, the OOTB scheduler DB for OD is not meant for production use - so you'd have to make sure to replace it with a real DB before relying on it. I don't think the OD scheduler really adds any significant value over a script called via cron - but I haven't used the scheduler too much (maybe once?) so I might be missing information about it.