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A RSS feed I would like to see from IBM...

What if there was a RSS feed in the Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum that let you keep track of responses to threads you are actively participating in. It would make it much easier to help other developers by letting you know when they added that crucial piece of information that you requested in order to help them.

I guess it could be done automatically if the backend was DB2. Wouldn't it be a great showcase for Domino on DB2 and the kinds of joining possible with a relational backend? I think there was a demo of this kind of functionality in the Domino on DB2 session at Lotusphere.

An alternative is a "Add responses to my feed" functionality that you manually activate when responding.

I know there is an e-mail notification functionality but they are only sent once a day, I have to manage the list of posts being watched (only 25 posts allowed), plus I really hate e-mail... :-)

Responses[5] RSS feed for responses to this blog entry
Posted by Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg on 28 April 2006 10:37:48 CEST #


Avatar: Richard Schwartz

Re: A RSS feed I would like to see from IBM...

Comment from Richard Schwartz on 08 May 2006 03:53:07 CEST #
What's DB2 got to do with it? If an agent can generate emails, it can certainly generate a chunk of XML and store it in your forum profile. A page could be set up with a formula to retrieve that XML. Then it's just a matter of setting the agent frequency to a reasonble interval that doesn't kill the server but makes the RSS worthwhile.

Re: A RSS feed I would like to see from IBM...

Comment from Mikkel Heisterberg on 08 May 2006 06:04:46 CEST #
There is no doubt that it could be done using an agent but that's just it. To avoid killing the server completely I just figured using DB2 as a data store and JOINing tables would be much more efficient than having to loop posts and responses for all users to generate custom RSS feeds.
Avatar: Richard Schwartz

Re: A RSS feed I would like to see from IBM...

Comment from Richard Schwartz on 08 May 2006 12:50:33 CEST #
I'm not convinced. The mail agent obviously doesn't kill the server completely. If the agent that updates feed data runs with the same frequencey it should have no worse an impact while it runs, and each hit from an RSS reader will be processed quickly since it is only reading previously computed information. Depending on implementation, the impact of a DB2 solution, however, could depend on either the frequency of connections from RSS readers or on the frequency of updates to the forum. Bear in mind. also, that as of now there is no claim by IBM for any performance advantage of DB2NSF over traditional NSF.

Re: A RSS feed I would like to see from IBM...

Comment from Mikkel Heisterberg on 08 May 2006 13:13:36 CEST #

What do you mean when you say "mail agent"? If you are refering to the mail rules then they are being evaluated by the Domino router task exactly for performance reasons.

And while I agree that IBM doesn't claim any performance advantage by using DB2 as a storage engine for Domino, I still think that a feed like the proposed would be easier and simpler implemented using SQL and JOINing than by looping documents in views.

Avatar: Richard Schwartz

Re: A RSS feed I would like to see from IBM...

Comment from Richard Schwartz on 08 May 2006 15:11:56 CEST #
By "Mail ageint", I'm referring to what you referred to yourself: "I know there is an e-mail notification functionality but they are only sent once a day." That mailing is done by an agent. Nothing to do with mail rules or the router. My proposal is that instead of the agent sending mail messages, it would build XML and store it in your forum profile. This would be an easy change, with no new design elements needed (although adding some columns to existing views would probably help). The feed would simply pull the pre-built XML from your profile and return it to you. If you poll it more than once a day you'll get the same results -- unless the folks who manage the forum set the agent to run more frequently.