ERP Associates, Inc.

Web feeds in PeopleSoft proof of concept is based on core PeopleTools technology and can be implemented today by most PeopleSoft customers who are running tools 8.4x.

Most of the work is done in an iScript. This is nothing fancy, just plain old PeopleCode that
1) Generates the RSS 2.0 headers,
2) Queries the database -- in this case for a user's reports,
3) Wraps the reports owned by the user in the appropriate RSS 2.0 tags
4) Responds with the XML message.

After the iScript is written, it's added to a permission list under the Web Libraries page. Once again, plain old PeopleTools security.

To allow the username and password credentials to be passed via a query string, I register the web library as a service in the XML Link function library. That way you can add userid=brent&pwd=brent to the URL and get the thing to respond with XML instead of a signon page.

Really, that's all you need to do to make it work as long as you can live with usernames and passwords on the URL. I didn't think most companies could live with that, so I took it one step further.

I created a Java servlet called XMLListeningConnector, and installed it under Integration Broker as another listening connector. The purpose of the servlet is to challenge the user for a username and password using standard HTTP Basic authentication, create the appropriate URL to the service you registered in the last step, call the URL with the credentials supplied by the user and pass the results back. I don't consider myself a Java guru so this would probably be easy stuff for most J2EE developers.

To make the RSS icon glow, I had to put the RSS Auto Discovery URL's in the main page header. This required modifying the PT_BRANDING Application Package and the PORTAL_UNI_HEADER_NS and PORTAL_UNI_HEADER_NS4X HTML objects. It was changed to get the RSS feeds you have security to and add them to the HTML document headers. I consider this the ugliest part of the modification since it touches PeopleTools objects and could have to be reapplied with every PeopleTools patch. If anyone has a better way to do this, let me know.

But in summary, I believe this can be deployed relatively quickly using your current PeopleSoft infrastructure and proven PeopleTools technology. There's really nothing new here, so don't be afraid to go for it.

Please contact me if you'd like some guidance. I currently have some availability toward the first of April. And if you would like to beta test the application demonstrated in the previous article, I'd be happy to arrange something special for early adopters. My e-mail is brent.martin@erpassociates.com.