RSS widgets in Elementi 2015

This page is about the RSS data-driven widgets included into Elementi 2015. For older versions, see the links below.

Introduction

The RSS widgets can be used to display content syndicated through RSS (Rich Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication) feeds provided by different publishers.

RSS feeds are commonly used to share frequently updated information: news headlines, blog entries, audio, video etc.) and can be easily found on the Internet - for instance, several RSS feeds provided by CNN can be found on http://edition.cnn.com/services/rss/.

Video tutorial

RSS widgets

Under the "RSS" folder of Elementi 2015 Library, you can find seven ready-to-use widgets that automatically display data extracted from a RSS data source:

RSS feed widgets

Text Bar
Displays text content using a fixed number of lines and applying a bottom-to-top & line-by-line scrolling effect whenever the entire text doesn't fit into the widget area.
Text Ticker
Displays text content using a continuous horizontal scrolling effect. The font size is adjusted automatically for the text to fit into the widget area.
Text Roll
Displays text content using a continuous vertical scrolling effect. The font size is adjusted automatically for the selected number of lines to fit into the predefined area.
Media Playlist
Displays a playlist of media items (images, videos) included into the RSS feed.
Media Crawler
Displays the media items (images, videos) included into the RSS feed using a continuous scrolling effect.
Slideshow
Displays slides composed of text & media layers, which are automatically filled out with data retrieved from the RSS feed. The slides are displayed one after another, with or without a transition effect in between, similarly to a playlist.
Table
Displays slides composed of multiple cells of text & media layers, which are automatically filled out with data retrieved from the RSS feed. The slides are displayed one after another, with or without a transition effect in between, similarly to a playlist.

Configuration

Each of the widgets above can be customized using the options provided under "Properties" tab - for more details go to the dedicated page of each widget type, linked above.

To edit the properties related to the data source, click on the button. This opens the Data Feed Properties dialog, which allows changing the URI from where the data are retrieved, the refresh rate, and the optional limit of items.

Note:

At any point, the data source configuration can be tested by clicking on the "Test..." button.

Advanced configuration

This section applies only for Elementi X users.

For Elementi X users, the "Data Feed Properties" dialog offers advanced options for more complex data processing.

RSS parser

"RSS Parser" tab of "Data Feed Properties" dialog in Elementi 2015 X

An RSS feed can be parsed into a table-like format, with columns and rows, using the RSS parser.

The RSS parser automatically detects whether the data is formatted according to RSS, RSS2.0 or Atom. It also cleans up malformed XML documents, fixes incorrect character entities and encoding errors, strips HTML tags from the fields like title and description, and extracts the URI for the media attached to the news items.

Once selected, the "RSS Parser" tab is added within the "Data Feed Properties" dialog, offering the following parameter:

Channel
Enable this when the RSS feeds contains multiple channels, and specify which channel to be used. If not set, the first channel is used.

Note:

Any formatting present within the RSS feed is discarded (the RSS standard is not designed for formatting, but for carrying plain text) - you can customize how the text appears on the screen within Elementi.

For more details about the RSS parser, see $.parseRSS() and parseRSS() functions.