RSS feeds from Blackboard Discussion Forums
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Problem
Need to get an RSS feed happening from Blackboard discussion forums.
Requirements
- Secure URL for the RSS feed
- Provide the most recent items
-
Allow user to specify the number of items to include - Make use of caching so that it's not creating a large amount of extra load on the server
The caching thing is a bit iffy, might simply think about generating a series of static pages, but that's too difficult as well.
Current implementation
wf object BbDiscussionRSS will generate RSS 2.0 feed containing last 11 messages posted to any YaBB forum. Only students enrolled in the course (in Peoplesoft) or staff entered in the ASA for the course will be able to see the RSS feed.
Outstanding questions
- How to identify the discussion forum to generate the RSS for
A Bb course can have many different discussion forums. Need a parameter to specify the name. - Because BBCopy is somewhat unreliable, may need some solution that isn't reliant on it always being up
i.e. it still generates RSS when the dbase is offline
Some inital thoughts
Use a url of the form
The BbConferenceRSS object will have the following "screens"
- default
- Takes the course, period and year and generates a HTML page that contains a list of all the conferences and the forums within those conferences for a course that is a Blackboard course site. Each conference name will be a link to a URL that generates an RSS file for that conference (containing the last 20 messages)
- Add the parameter VIEW=OPML and the default view will generate an OPML feed. For each conference
- RSS
- Takes course, period, year, conference and a number of posts (X). Will generate an RSS feed for that conference in a Blackboard course site for the given course offering. The RSS feed will contain the X most recent posts.
