This article targets: TIBCO Spotfire 2.1 and forward
Introduction
RSS feeds and other types of web syndication services have now been around for a while. I don’t know about you, but I have a very difficult time imagining my life without them. In essence, such feeds allow you to get your favorite news items delivered to your local reader, be it Google Reader, Outlook, Feed Reader, or Firefox. What you might not know is that TIBCO Spotfire Professional and TIBCO Spotfire Web Player both include such a reader. The reader is very minimalistic and obviously not comparable to software dedicated to this purpose, but it does provide Analytics Server administrators the ability to communicate information that is essential to users of TIBCO Spotfire. In the screenshots below, you see a case where an administrator has decided to communicate information about the patches deployed on the Analytics Server.
Just to give you an idea of what the feed can be useful, here are some examples:
- Communicate maintenance information for the Analytics Server.
- Inform users of new extensions and/or patches that have been applied on the server.
- Present new files that have been published to the library.
- Information about other servers in the same environment that also can be accessed.
- Any news feed that might be interesting to the users of TIBCO Spotfire.
- Inform users of all the new useful articles being published to the Spotfire Technology Network Knowledge Base.
Activating the Feed
As mentioned before, the RSS feed in TIBCO Spotfire is enabled on an Analytics Server by that server’s administrator(s). To activate a feed, the following XML element must be added to the server manifest file (manifest.xml) which resides in the [server_installation_directory]\server\webapps\spotfire\WEB-INF folder:
<manifest>
…
<client-login>
<show-login-dialog>Always</show-login-dialog>
…
<rss>/spotfire/rss.xml</rss>
</client-login>
…
</manifest>
The value of the <rss> tag corresponds to the URL of the feed you wish to display, be it relative to the Analytics Server or a URL to an external resource.
Note: When using Windows Integrated Authentication or when users make use of the ‘Remember Me’ functionality in the login dialog, they do not see the login dialog when launching the application. Hence, you (being the administrator) risk them loosing the information you push out through the RSS feed. There is of course a way for you to enforce that the login dialog is shown at all times. The preferred approach of doing so is to set the value of the <show-login-dialog> tag to “Always” as seen in the XML snippet above.
Limitations
The feed reader in TIBCO Spotfire supports the RSS 2.0 standard with a set of limitation. For instance, it only allows textual entries (i.e. it does not support news items that contain HTML and/or images). This is due to the feed being rendered in the login dialog of the application, which has a limited width and height. There are also a number of other restrictions as listed below. Note that failing to meet any of those may cause the Spotfire client to not render the feed at all.
- The feed must conform to version 2.0 of the RSS specification.
- The feed itself may be associated with a link, e.g. where it is obtained from, the start page of the Analytics Server, or any other web page. This link is hooked up to the big blue info icon you see in the screenshot.
- Feed items must contain a title, a description, a publication date, and have a link associated with them. The latter can be used to refer users to a web site or Intranet site where more information about the news item can be obtained.
- The feed must not contain any HTML or links to images. Such information will not be rendered.
- Only the five latest news entries will be rendered.
The following is a snippet from a valid RSS feed:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Analytics Server Feed</title>
<link>http://myserver</link>
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:56:53 +0100</lastBuildDate>
<description>Analytics Server Patch Updates</description>
<item>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://myserver/patches/abc.html</guid>
<link>http://myserver/patches/abc.html</link>
<title>Deployed Patch A50625 (Web)</title>
<description>We just deployed patch A50625.</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:13:11 +0100</pubDate>
</item>
…
</channel>
</rss>
Conclusions
In this article I have illustrated one of the “hidden” but very useful features of TIBCO Spotfire, RSS feed visualization. I have also described why you would want to use the functionality, and how to enable it.