REST.MSO CustomFormatter subroutines are great for Unibasic programmers who don't mind familiarizing themselves with UDO JSON parsing and building text and HTML displays.
But what can you do without getting into programming?
There is another REST JSON formatter named REST.NEWS. Its purpose is to support writing NEWS.ARTICLES with content from REST providers. It works similarly to the MCD_DATA.NEWS AR/SO dashboard code behind subroutine in that it lets you layout a template in the news article body with &var& type replacement variables.
Use the new News Source REST in place of CUSTOM to save yourself some typing.
REST.NEWS will run the REST service specified and then look for expressions in the body like &propertyname& and replace them with the corresponding value from the web service JSON response. It will also check for expressions matching variables sent to the web service like CITY in this example.
So we can hit the same REST provider as our previous MSO and see the results laid out nicely, all without doing any actual programming:
There is an important distinction between MSOs and NEWS.ARTICLES in their scope.
At release 8.1 sp5 MSOs can be configured to be available in any PWS or web function throughout Manage 2000.
The scope of news articles is a little different:
In terms of Manage 2000 functions, you only see them in NewsReader and the News panels of the 16 or so web functions in the ROIPortals directory.
However, news articles are NOT limited to viewing in Manage 2000 functions. Manage 2000 news feeds can be viewed from any RSS client. This includes Outlook, Sharepoint, Lotus, the built-in IE newsreader, browser add-ons like Sage for FireFox and SlickRSS for Chrome, standalone readers like RSSOwl, and others.
There is also an interesting reciprocity between the two: MSOs can be used as the source for NEWS.ARTICLES, and since Newsreader is a Manage 2000 function an MSO can wrapper a display of articles in Newsreader.
In this sense the news article scope is actually wider than the MSO scope. One could even use the auto-start feature of MSOs to fire off a Newsreader display based upon the user entering any particular PWS function or prompt.
