Mashzone Datafeed: how can I read RSS information ?

Markus Weinreich on September 29, 2009

After having managed to install Mashzone, I was wondering how to read RSS information. For example, Yahoo will deliver the local weather in XML format on this request:

http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=GMXX0007&u=c

If I set up a new datafeed using a XML-file, enter the above URL with RSS style and /rss/channel/item as a recurring element, mashzone prints out an internal error because it needs columns to be configured. But the "configure.." link in the feed is greyed out.

Any idea ?

MfG Markus

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3 Replies

Stephan Freudl on September 29, 2009
Hi Markus,

thanks for your feedback. Actually it works very well for me, as you can see in the screen shot.

There are two reasons for your trouble I can think of now:

Did you specify any options in the data source? I checked use attributes and use sub-elements to put colum data from the XML channel element into the data feed.

If the first did not help the cause might be a general connection problem.

You may switch to the raw data mode of the debugger to check if you receive any data from the requested URL at all.

If you see some XML text your connection is fine and its all about your data source configuration. If the problem remains please check the proxy configuration in the ARIS MashZone, Administration, Server settings panel. Its important to understand that your browser proxy settings are irrelevant at this point since its the MashZone server which computes data feeds and therefore connects to URLs.

After you adapted the settings to your environement everything should be fine. If any problem remains just let me know.

Regards

Stephan
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MW

Markus Weinreich on September 30, 2009 as Reply to Parveen Jaswal

Hello,

thanks for having a look at my problem. It was indeed the proxy, on this test machine the mashzone is not allowed to query the internet (even if I'm having no problem using the same http-address in a parallel window).

But I came up with an other thing for you. I copied the rss file to the local ressources directory and told mashzone to read it from there. The input came OK, but only as a plain text. I had to close the feed and open it up again to see the data in columns. Mashzone did that repetedly.

MfG Markus

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Stephan Freudl on September 30, 2009

Hi Markus,

regarding to "no problem using the same http-address in a parallel window" please note that even if your browser is configured to connect the internet via a proxy server the ARIS MashZone server might not. It is all about Administration and Server settings.

Additionally, since the weather forecast is stored locally in resources you will not receive any updates from Yahoo.

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce your case. Every time I debug the forecast XML file it is never displayed in plain text.

Regards

Stephan

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