Templated Rendering of REST Provider's JSON Responses in Manage 2000

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.

Embedding Power BI Reports in Manage 2000 News Feeds

Power BI provides shareable visualizations mashed up from multiple data sources.  The data might come from Excel or SQL or ODBC.  For instance Manage 2000 data might be synced through Novo Motion Outbound to SQL server. From there Power BI might refresh reports and dashboards.

Users can consume the report through the Power BI interface.  But it is also very easy to embed Power BI reports in Manage 2000 news articles for display in the Manage 2000 function NewsReader or other RSS feed readers.

From the Power BI Service browser interface:

Select a report

Select File

Select Embed

Copy the iframe content

Paste it into a STATIC article Summary (HTML) prompt

(Recent updates to Power BI have made this a little more round about;

 After copying the iframe snippet into the Summary (HTML) prompt -

   copy the link to the app.powerbi.com website from the Secure embed code dialog to the clipboard

   use the Edit button on the right to bring the Summary (HTML) text up in the editor

   select the string inside the quotes on the right side of the "src" attribute

   paste in the app.powerbi.com url string

   save the contents back to the Summary (HTML) prompt - 8/19/2019)

(Even more recent updates corrected this hiccup.)

Copy the link to the app.powerbi.com website

Paste it into the Drill Back Document prompt
(Clicking on the news article link will send the user to the drill back URL, in this case the report in the Power BI Service. If related detail such as the original Manage 2000 data is available from another URL use that instead.)

Attach the article to a news feed and view from the Newsreader function:

Selecting a row in the airport table refocuses the map to display that specific information. The interactive features of the report remain active when viewed in a Manage 2000 newsfeed.

RSS Feed Readers for Firefox and Chrome

I've been going through some cross browser testing and came to the issue of newsfeed readers. Historically we have been focused on IE, Outlook 2007+, and SharePoint.  But now that the Manage 2000 web site is supporting other browsers, I started wondering about the news feed reader choices that work well with Firefox and Chrome.

What I found was a plethora of website based news aggegators.  These do not work well for Manage 2000 purposes.  We would like to read rss feeds coming out of Manage 2000 on our intranet without providing access from some Internet hosted rss feed reading site.

These animals do exist.  I poked around with searches like "local RSS reader".

For Firefox users there has been a suitable and popular reader available as an extension for a long time called 'Sage':

For Chrome users I found a couple of extensions that work hand in hand.  'Slick RSS Feed Finder' alerts you to the available feeds on a page and lets you subscribe to them. And 'Slick RSS' lets you actually read and manage your feeds:

Release 7.3 Project Progress

Despite broken ankles and bouts of pneumonia Doug and I finally have the Manage 2000 web functions building under VS2008.  There remains a little tweaking to do on the installations routines.  But at last I feel like I can concentrate on new feature development.

I have started down the development list and finished my first significant web tools enhancement for 7.3, the integration of ECA's and the news feed system.  ECA's provide rich html scripting from all sorts of system events.  News feeds provide standard pluggable integration to Sharepoint and other web platforms.  Putting the two together really extends  the news source capabilities to 'broadcast' all sorts of automated news articles as the ERP systems churns through its machinations. 

Next up is Last Key integration between PWS sessions and web functions.  This will, in all likely hood, be the largest project I undertake for the 7.3 release (not counting the VS2008 ASP.NET 3.5 infrastructure upgrade).

I am still in the early stages of design, but have identified a whole raft of issues that were not obvious to me during my initial rough cut do-ability considerations.  I didn't realize how much of the fun part of working on Manage 2000 are these design conundrums that must be puzzled and teased out.