Introduction –

In my earlier blog  Creating SAPUI5 Applications based on Public JSON APIs or Web Services I discussed about consuming rest based APIs into UI5 application. On similar lines, I was thinking to make use of RSS feed data to be used in UI5 applications.

Basically my intention was to create web application which will display my entire documents/blogs summary and will help me to easily navigate to it and also I was looking for way to easily see unanswered questions in single page with ability to navigate to it. 

As SCN community is based on Jive platform, I thought initially to try out Jive APIs but I did not found any information related to it. Then I came across this great document Everything I know about… SCN RSS Feeds by Jason Lax which invoked me to think if it is possible to develop SAPUI5 application which will read the RSS feed data and display in excellent rich user interface.

So I started working on these things and my first challenge was finding a way to convert RSS feed to JSON. On googling, I found out this discussion jquery – Converting RSS To JSON – Stack Overflow

With the jQuery Howto: Google Feeds API – jQuery plugin , I was able to convert RSS to JSON overcoming CORS issue.

So here I will share details of 3 application based on RSS feed. All 3 applications can read any RSS feed but I will mainly focus on SCN RSS feed data.

1) Display SCN (Or Any)   RSS feed into FeedTile

In this application, I am using google feed api jQuery plugin to read RSS feed and converting it to JSON and then later pushing this data to feed items. FeedTile container is used to display FeedItems aggregation.

GiHub Code Link –  sapui5-scnapp/scnFeedTile.html at master · CmIm/sapui5-scnapp · GitHub

Demo Application Link –  SCN App#1

Basically you can read any valid RSS feed and display it in FeedTile.

2) UI5 Application Displaying SCN User Documents on dynamic Tiles

2^nd application is based on reading RSS feed of an SCN user. So upon entering the name of SCN User, it will display documents created by the user for feed with below query http://scn.sap.com/community/feeds/documents?rssUsername=<scn_user>

Maximum 15 documents created by SCN user will be displayed in the form of tiles and on click of tile, it will open document in new browser window.

Here I am showing SCN feed result of great SCN authors Thomas Jung, Tammy Powlas and DJ Adams !

GiHub Code Link – sapui5-scnapp/scnUserTile.html at master · CmIm/sapui5-scnapp · GitHub

Demo Application Link – SCN App#2

3) UI5 Application Displaying SCN (Or Any) RSS feed details on dynamic Tiles

In this application, SCN RSS feed data will be displayed on tiles. The difference between this and 2^nd application is this will display content of any user as per feed data.

You can display data for overall SCN space or for particular space. You can select any entry from dialog and click on display button.

For SCN Blog posts feed, below is the result.

Below is the result for SAPUI5 space.

To get the details of unanswered questions in particular space, you need to get the feed url of space with community id. For e.g. SAPUI5 space is having community id 2421 and below is the result for it.

You can type any other valid SCN feed url as well. Here is result for ABAP space,

And finally you can read the status updates of user as well ! It will accessed with url http://scn.sap.com/people/<scn_user_name>/feeds/updates [Reference – Jive 6.0 Community Administrator Documentation]

GiHub Code Link – sapui5-scnapp/scnFeed.html at master · CmIm/sapui5-scnapp · GitHub

Demo Application Link – SCN App#3

Below are the url to specific SCN spaces with community id.

ABAP – http://scn.sap.com/community/feeds?community=2015

SAP NW Gateway – http://scn.sap.com/community/feeds?community=2130

SAP HANA – http://scn.sap.com/community/feeds?community=2127

SAP Mobile – http://scn.sap.com/community/feeds?community=2056

SAPUI5 Space – http://scn.sap.com/community/feeds/unansweredthreads?community=2421

Closing Remarks –

I am still not able to show result for this SCN feed which is used for getting feed for SCN user’s blogs – http://scn.sap.com/blogs/feeds/users/<SCN_USER_NAME>

If it is opened in browser, it gives the result but not working in my application.

If the user name is firstName.lastName then only user photo will be displayed because I put the logic accordingly to show photo dynamically and it was not possible for other formats of user name.

I hope you will like my SCN applications and will use those to get maximum benefit as per your requirement. Please feel free to improve it to any extent.

SDN was good, SCN is better now let’s make SCN UX Best !

As usual, Please feel free to put your comments/suggestions.

Happy Learning & Coding ! 🙂 🙂 🙂