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Viewing news related to a specific attribute, document, or dataset

The RSS Reader widget can automatically display news related to any attribute in your dashboard. For example, if the name of a digital music player is selected from the Item attribute in a report, news related to that digital music player is retrieved from the RSS news source and displayed in the widget.

To display news about an attribute element, you must use a dynamic RSS feed URL in the widget. For example, if you are using a Yahoo! RSS feed and want to display news for any category selected from the Category attribute, you must define the RSS feed's URL as follows:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p={[Category]}&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

This URL includes the necessary p= query parameter, as well as the URL's Universal Transformation Code (UTF) encoding and language properties.

Some URLs, such as the one above, include a parameter for UTF. If you have to specify this parameter in a URL, use UTF-8 encoding.

The other requirements for displaying news about an attribute element are listed below:

  • The attribute must be on the Grid/Graph that contains the RSS widget.

  • The attribute must be enabled as a selector.

  • The RSS widget must be set as a target of the attribute.

For the Category attribute example above, this means that the Category attribute on the Grid/Graph must be enabled as a selector and that the widget must be set as the target of this attribute selector. This ensures that when an attribute element is selected from the Category attribute, news related to that category of products is displayed in the widget.

Consider the following example. A Grid/Graph in a document displays sales information for a store in Delaware, which is an element of the Customer State attribute. You want to display local news on your dashboard so that a document analyst can correlate sales numbers to industry news for a particular state. To do this, set the RSS Reader widget as the target of the Customer State attribute. Use a dynamic RSS feed URL and a data field in the widget to ensure that the RSS Reader widget displays news related to the state selected in the document. A data field is dynamic text that is populated by the actual name of a report object (in this case, an attribute) at run time. For this example, the attribute data field to use in the RSS feed's query parameter is {[CustomerState]}. For more information on data fields and instructions to create them, see Adding data fields to documents.

A complete URL can look like the following:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p={[Customer State]}&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

Consider another example. You want to view news about a customer when you select that customer's name from a selector in your dashboard. To achieve this, you must set the RSS Reader widget as a target of the selector. You must also insert a data field for the Customer attribute in the RSS feed's URL. When a customer is chosen from the selector, the widget displays news about that customer. For this example, the attribute data field to use in the RSS feed's query parameter is {[Customer]}. A complete URL may look like the following:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p={[Customer]}&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

You can also display news related to a document or dataset report by inserting the document or dataset name in the query parameter of the RSS feed's URL. To do so, use either of the following formats in the RSS feed's URL:

  • q={[#name of document#]}

  • q={[#name of dataset#]}

Guidelines to specify URLs for attributes, documents, and datasets

Follow the guidelines below when specifying the URL for a dynamic RSS feed:

  • Attribute names: Use this format to specify the query parameter in the RSS feed's URL: {[name of attribute]}.

  • Use a + character to separate the names of different attributes or attribute elements. For example, if you are using a selector to filter the Store and Zip Code attributes, type {[Store]+[ZipCode]}.

  • Document or dataset names: Use this format to specify the query parameter in the RSS feed's URL: {[#name of document/dataset#]}.

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