Monday, October 13, 2003

Secret Feature: RSS Feeds from Vault

I've got a secret I've been dying to share, and my weblog seems like a good place to spill the beans:  SourceGear Vault 1.2 can generate RSS feeds. 

Basically we provide an aspx page which generates an RSS feed containing information about recent checkins.  For a sample of how this works, try this feed, which shows the last 60 days of checkins done by the folks who did the integration of Vault with NAnt.

We consider these RSS feeds to be an unofficial feature.  Until this blog posting, we haven't really told anybody about it.  One reason for the secrecy is because this feature is currently somewhat user-hostile.  If you want to see RSS feeds from your Vault server, you need to construct a special URL and manually place it in your aggregator.  This blog posting is the only documentation that exists.

The URL for the sample feed above looks like this:

http://vaultpub.sourcegear.com/VaultService/VaultWeb/rss2.aspx
?login=guest&password=guest&
repository=Build_Tool_Integration&days=60

Things to notice:

• vaultpub.sourcegear.com is simply a Vault server we host here at SourceGear for people working on things we want to host.
  
  
• The base URL for the RSS feature on your Vault server is /VaultService/VaultWeb/rss2.aspx
  
  
• Unfortunately, you have to provide your login and password right there as parameters in the URL.  This isn't a big problem on VaultPub since we've got a guest account there, but if you use this for real stuff, keep the URL private.
  
  
• Vault servers can host multiple repositories.  You need to specify which one you want to see.
  
  
• The days parameter is used to specify how many days of history information you want to retrieve.  The default is just one day.  I've specified 60 days here, but that's just for the purpose of illustration.

There is one other important reason why we haven't hyped this feature:  We've done very little testing on it.  It may work for you, or it may not.  For example, Vault's RSS feeds seem to work just fine in SharpReader and NewsGator, but they've never been tested in any other aggregator.  The feed is apparently valid, although in my experience that doesn't guarantee interop.

Like I said, this feature is currently very unofficial.  A few weeks ago I wanted to dust off my compiler, and this feature is what happened.  If it doesn't work for you, we'd like to hear any bug reports, but for now we're setting low expectations.  In other words, we would prefer that you be pleasantly surprised if this feature does work rather than frustrated if it does not.