Re: [Ruqueue-devel] RSS feeds

[John Fulton]

Montana Quiring wrote:

> Sorry to keep pestering this list, I promise I'll stop soon.

We're happy to hear from you so I hope not ;)

> Are there any plans to implement RSS feeds into ruQueue?

Funny you should mention that.  I was talking to some people at U Mass
last week and they are interested in the same feature.  No one at
Rutgers ever mentioned it, but I think some of our users might be
pleasantly surprised.

Note that we already have an XML API:

 http://ruqueue.rutgers.edu/api.php

but that it is based on ruQueue's own DTD and is mainly used to write
back to tickets.  Here are some use cases for it (view source):

 http://ruqueue.rutgers.edu/api/use_cases.xml

The last one outputs all data for a certain ticket.  This is not
something anyone can just subscribe to.  It was made under the
assumption that someone might write a separate app for it.

> It would be nice to be able offer up the subject lines, etc. of a
> users, or Queue's jobs through an RSS feed.

I think that a directory called "rss" should be created under
web-interface:

http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/ruqueue/ruqueue/web-interface/?root=ruqueue

and that index.php should provide the RSS feed.  So pointing a browser
at http://ruqueue.domain.tld/rss would show the RSS feed.  But what
should the feed look like?  There could be many variations based on
how you want to group the data:

rss/?queue=foo
        Shows tickets in foo queue

rss/?user=jfulton
        Shows open tickets for jfulton user

rss/?ticket=108
        Shows all comments for ticket 108

rss/?status=open
        Shows all open tickets

rss/?status=open&user=jfulton
        Shows all open tickets for jfulton

Etc.  I'm not saying we need all of the above, I'm just brain
storming. What did you have in mind?  Is this something that end users
can use to view tickets created for them or something that staff can
use to keep track of the tickets they need to resolve?  Should some
authentication be put in place?

In order to keep things simple do you just want to provide nothing but
the Subjects and Tickets (by number) of non-resolved tickets only for
a user xor queue?

rss/?queue=foo
rss/?user=jfulton

If you're only providing subjects and status it probably isn't a
security issue.  I.e. if someone else out there knows that some user
(assuming they know which uid to use) has an open ticket called
"computer broke" it's probably not a big deal.  I think that this
simplified version might be a good place to start.

> I'm guessing that doing this without raising the software
> requirements of the ruQueue install would be preferred.

I think you can do this rather easily with PHP so it wouldn't raise
the requirements much.  The ruQueue in CVS works great with PHP5 and
MySQL5 so if you're thinking in terms of those software requirements
that shouldn't be an issue.  If there's some 3rd party lib that you
think will make this much easier don't worry too much about adding it
(assuming it has a liberal license).  E.g. the mail_comments *module*
requires Perl with certain CPAN libs.  Not everyone bothers to get
this module working and the fact that is is available doesn't hurt
anyone.  I would see rss as a separate module that can be disabled.
If this happens I would add a switch to the system variables table and
update the rss code to turn off if it is set to zero.

> If I can find some free time this weekend I'll look into it.

Very cool.  I would have gotten back to you sooner, but I was out of
town this weekend.  I've created a task in Savannah for this:

 https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/index.php?6027

If you want to work on it please try checking out the latest copy from
CVS and then try adding the rss subdirectory in web-interface.  If you
write something that you like please send me a link to the tar ball.

You might also want to get a Savannah account.  The following might
help if you're interested:

 http://ruqueue.rutgers.edu/coordination.php

  John