Preparing Your Information

The first step in the process is to create a new, or identify an existing, Report definition that will produce the information that you want to have appear on your feed page. This could be in an existing Logi application or in a separate application created just for this purpose. At a minimum, the application will need one Report definition and one Process definition with a task.

If you're creating a new Report definition just for this purpose, don't worry about its appearance; no one is going to see it. Don't bother with style sheets, other formatting, or report headers or footers, either.

Your report definition can contain anything from a static set of Label elements to a Data Table with data from a database. You want to be sure this report will contain the minimum information you'll need to create your feed page: a title, a URL to the content it describes, a timestamp, and a brief description. for each item in the feed list.

Feed pages are usually time-oriented; users get them because they want to know the latest information. In addition, the best feed pages provide a sane number of entries - the Top Ten (most recent) stories, for example - rather than a great long list of links. If you're getting the data from a database, you might want to retrieve the data sorted by timestamp and limited to a small number of records.

Once you've built your report, preview it and ensure that all of the desired data is there before proceeding.