Most people use the console for displaying information about the tournament and league...but did you know that you can also display live external content on the console?
This mentor will walk you through how to do it.
For those who don't know, "RSS" stands for "really simple syndication". It's a standard format for posting information on the web that can be consumed and displayed in a standard way by "RSS readers". Since the format is standard, that makes it really easy to display the following on the console (these are just some examples):
Note: It should be obvious, but you'll need a network connection to utilize RSS feeds.
This might actually be the hardest part: What feed has the content you want.
Yahoo actually has quite a few feeds. Google for "yahoo rss feeds" and you'll find their main RSS page with links to various feeds.
What you need: The URL for the feed.
As a note, I was going to embed many core feeds into the application, but I decided I didn't want to get into any trouble. Go to the bulletin board for examples of feeds people are using.
Once you have the URL for the feed you want to use, you can create a new "RSS Feed" in the application. Go to the RSS configuration panel and create a new feed, giving it an appropriate name (to distinguish one feed from another) and the URL of the feed.
In the feed editor, you can test the feed by clicking on the "debug" button. That will attempt to pull content from the feed. If you see a bunch of ugly text, you were successful.
Keep the feed marked as active and the application will automatically refresh content from the feed every five minutes.
Next, you need to define what you want to pull from the feed you just created. Remember how ugly that text was in the last step? We don't want to display that on the console. Instead, we want to extract important bits out of it.
Create a new extraction to bring up the extraction editor. Give the extraction a name and point it at the feed you just created. Keep the editor up!
Now you need to determine what to pull from the feed. This is the hardest part, especially if you don't know XML...but let's walk through it. In the editor, click on the binoculars to view the content of the feed. What you're looking at is XML (extensible markup language) that is structured in a standard way. What you should notice is that it is structured somewhat like a tree of information. Each thingy between a "<" and a ">" is called an element. What we need to discover is the element tree path to the content you want.
Usually, the content you want is going to be a <title> inside of an <item> inside of a <channel>....and that's why the default path is "channel item title".
If the same path occurs multiple times, all content that matches will be pulled. Most RSS feeds have multiple items and each item has a title.
Sometimes the content you want is actually embedded inside of an element's attribute, in which case you'll also need to set the attribute.
Don't struggle too much on this part, get help on the BB or from Dr. Neau directly.
You can debug your extraction right within the editor.
Once you have the path and attribute set correctly, define the variable that the content should be put into.
Note: You can have multiple extractions pull from the same feed. You can also have multiple extractions write to the same console variable.
This is as simple as creating a new component (either a console variable component or a console variable marquee component) and pointing it at the console variable used by your RSS extraction.
Once you've done all of that, you're set.
Not that anyone would ever want to do this, but it's an example I can talk about since it's my content.
Step 1: Find RSS feed
The RSS feed is "http://drneau.com/rss.xml"
Step 2: Create RSS feed definition
Go to the RSS configuration panel and create a new feed called "Dr. Neau" with the URL "http://drneau.com/rss.xml".
Click on the debug button to make sure it is working. You should see a big ugly document that looks like a summary of Dr. Neau releases.
Step 3: Create RSS extraction
Like most RSS feeds, the data we want is the titles of the items.
Create a new extraction pointing at the "Dr. Neau Updates" feed.
Step 4: Modify your console dashboard
Add a new "console variable marquee component" to your dashboard. Set it to use variable "R1".