Further Customizing WebCenter PS3/PS4 RSS Task Flow - RSS Items List

I have received request from blog reader, based on my previous blog post - Extending WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 ADF Task Flows - RSS Example. Standard WebCenter PS3/PS4 RSS task flow is missing one very important property - number of RSS items to be rendered in the list. Request was about how to add such property and extend existing RSS task flow.

Download sample application, it extends WebCenter RSS task flow through seeded MDS customizations and provides ability to specify number of RSS items to be rendered - EnterprisePortalApp_v6.zip.

There is no option to add new RSS task flow parameter with seeded MDS customization, so we should follow different approach. What we can do is to append RSS feed URL with number of RSS items we want to render. I will describe below, how to customize standard WebCenter RSS task flow, in order to be able to append this property to RSS feed URL. For example, if we want to render 3 items, we will append ?rss=3:

For 7 items, append ?rss=7:

For 10 items, append ?rss=10 and so on:

Two RSS feeds are rendered, using extended WebCenter RSS task flow, different number of RSS items (3 and 7 as it was defined above):

Another RSS view, with 10 items as defined above:

How we can extend WebCenter RSS task flow? For basic steps and JDeveloper configuration, follow this blog. Once you understand basic steps, we can move forward. Let's define managed bean in request scope, it will act as RSS helper bean and will be used to parse RSS feed URL:

This bean defines two methods. GetRSSFeedLocation() method is to parse RSS feed URL and remove all custom parameters - otherwise original WebCenter RSS task flow functionality will not work. GetRSSItemsNum() method is to retrieve number of RSS items to be shown:

Once we have our custom methods in place, as per previous blog post - ensure that seeded MDS customizations are enabled:

Switch to Customization Developer mode, we will modify WebCenter RSS library:

Make sure site level customization context is enabled:

First customization we should apply is for RSS link:

Make sure that RSS destination is set to point to RSS feed location retrieved from our RSS helper bean:

In order to control how many items we want to show in RSS list, we should change original RSS task flow implementation and switch af:table component with af:iterator:

Make sure that Rows property for af:iterator point to our RSS helper bean method - it will parse RSS feed URL added parameters and return how many RSS items should be shown:

Page definition for RSS viewer, contains method which constructs RSS items list. RSS feed location URL must be changed here as well to point to custom RSS helper bean:

In order to review applied customizations, you can go to ADF Library Customization package and expand it:

You will see applied customization for page definition file of RSS viewer, RSS list construction method:

RSS viewer UI customizations are stored in MDS as well - table switch with iterator:

RSS link customization, to retrieve RSS feed URL from custom RSS helper bean: