ND 7.0.2 and RSS

I’ve had 7.0.2 installed for 10 days now and have spent a little time playing with the new features. First thing to say is that generally it’s a great release, stable, some much requested features have been added, all well communicated. This is the way all software releases should be run.

I think my expectations of the RSS generator may have been a little too much though. The basic generator is great, it makes publishing flat feeds very easy, so if you’re just getting into RSS then it’s well worth a look. But I have a few issues once you begin to do anything a little more complex…

My first worry is that the generation is handled by an agent, not a problem for low volume sites but once you’ve published a few feeds and have several hundred subscribers you’ll be looking at thousands of page loads per day, I would have much preferred the XML be served out by a view instead. I know that’s a big ask, it’s effectively a new design element then, but hey you’ve got to ask for these things to keep the Lotus guys on their toes.

Now onto my specific problems. I, like most people, prefer to run my web sites using session authentication, which means that if you want to serve personalised RSS feeds out to users you need to create a separate site configuration which is set up to handle simple authentication. Not a big problem, but I was led to understand that 7.0.2 was going to offer the ability to selectively serve some URL’s out via simple authentication from within one site. I can’t for the life of me find out where that’s configured, or if I just misunderstood what was being given to us.
Update: Chris Linfoot has found the problem, he describes the solution in the comments here

Onwards then. The reason I wanted to allow authenticed RSS feeds was to allow people to subscribe to a view of "My Items" within a database. They can see all documents in the database but need to be notified when a document is assigned to them. According to the RSS configuration database, you shouldn’t use categorized views, so how do I build the list of documents which each individual user needs to be told about.

All of the above are specific to my own implementation and have pretty obvious work arounds within the application, I was just hoping that some of the heavy lifting was going to be taken off my hands by the server. Oh well, for me it’s continued use of hand rolled RSS for a while longer.