Hi All,

Here i am again with something interesting thing with Salesforce.

Do you think how it is cool if our Salesforce Organiztion's information will be displayed on variety of Adhoc Web clients. For example I want to display my open cases from my organiztion on iGoogle Home page as a Gadget, my Blackberry or iPhone mobile or My Gmail , Yahoo page or GTalk or Google Reader and so on .... at the same time and same information. Isn't it cool!!!

Yes this is the Power of RSS Feed.


What Is RSS and Why to use it.

RSS was designed to show selected data.

Without RSS, users will have to check your site daily for new updates. This may be too time-consuming for many users. With an RSS feed (RSS is often called a News feed or RSS feed) they can check your site faster using an RSS aggregator (a site or program that gathers and sorts out RSS feeds).

Since RSS data is small and fast-loading, it can easily be used with services like cell phones or PDA's.

Web-rings with similar information can easily share data on their web sites to make them better and more useful.

So, here in this tutorial i am going tell you how you can convert Case Information like your case number with priority and a small Case summary from your Salesforce Organization into RSS Feed and then how you can consume these feeds into your iGoogle/My Yahoo home page or any variety of consumers.

1) Make a contoller with following code (RssFeedController):-

public class RssFeedController{
public List<Case> caseList {get;set;}
public RssFeedController(){
caseList = [SELECT Id, CaseNumber, Subject, Priority from Case];
}
}

2) Make a Visual Force with following code (RssFeedGenerator):-
<apex:page contenttype="text/xml" sidebar="false" showheader="false" controller="RssFeedController">
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>SFDC Case List</title>
<description>The List gives you all cases open in Your SFDC Org</description>
<link>https://ap1.salesforce.com/500?fcf=00B90000001SEXr</link>
<apex:repeat value="{!caseList}" var="cnt">
<item>
<title>{!cnt.CaseNumber} - {!cnt.Priority}</title>
<description>{!cnt.Subject}</description>
<link>https://ap1.salesforce.com/{!cnt.Id}</link>
</item>
</apex:repeat>
</channel>
</rss>
</apex:page>

3) Enable sites in your organization and add VF page/Contoller to you sites. Also provide read permission on Case object for sites.

4) Now open your sites with our VF page like this:-
http://labsprojects-developer-edition.ap1.force.com/rssfeedgenerator

5) What you see on the page? Your page is converted to a RSS Feed Generator. Isn't it good!!!.
See the above section is for RSS Feed subscribtion area. The below is your feeds.

6) Now you can subscribe this page to variety of Feed Readers like google, yahoo , blogs etc.
For example click on My Yahoo or google from the top dropdown and click on subscribe. It automatically add one Feed Gadgets to your My Yahoo or iGoogle page like below:-


7) Now you can also play with it and add the above rss feed url to any consumer which support RSS Reading like blackberry, iPhone, GTalk, blogs or even your custom RSS Reader for you website.
For Example:-
a. iGoogle





b. My Yahoo

c. GTalk: There are many variety of free available bots which you can add into your gtalk for RSS Feed reading.

d. BlackBerry and iPhone: You can easily consume your rss feeds into your blackberry and iphone

e. Google Reader: Its easy to embed your rss feed into your Google Reader and let the worlds know about it

f. SMS: You can make one Google Channel with your RSS Feed. Then make it SMS enabled and whoever subscribe it , will get notified whenever a new feed comes via SMS.

g. Blog: There are many gadgets which are available for feed reading and you can just plug them into your blog easily into sidebar etc.

h. Website: Of course you can parse your rss feed with any language and add to your website.

So without login or not much code we can view useful information from our salesforce org to any of our client consumers. so, Play with this Good Feature.

Thanks
Aslam Bari