Key Capabilities
- RSS and Atom feed consumption with automatic polling and multiple authentication schemes
- Incremental update support using If-Modified-Since headers and ETag-based duplicate detection
- Configurable response header promotion for metadata extraction
Overview
RSS connectors expose a simple interface to automatically poll for downloadable content from a specific RSS or Atom feed. The connector can be configured to only process new and updated content, and can perform both HTTP and TLS authentication to the remote service.Connector Settings
Settings Tab
Configuration
Settings related to the core configuration of the connector.| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Connector Id | The static, unique identifier for the connector. |
| Connector Type | Displays the connector name and a description of what it does. |
| Connector Description | An optional field to provide a free-form description of the connector and its role in the flow. |
| Feed URL | The HTTP or HTTPS endpoint from where RSS content should be downloaded. |
| Feed Type | Whether the remote URL is an RSS or Atom feed. |
| Use If-Modified-Since | When enabled, the connector includes an If-Modified-Since header in the outgoing request that equals the latest publication date and time from the previous download attempt. This causes the server to filter responses based on what content is new or has been modified recently. |
| Process New Items | When enabled, the connector stores the last modified date from previous downloads, and filters out results that are not new or modified since that date. The result is the same as Use If-Modified-Since, but the filtering is done on the client-side rather than sending a filter condition to the server. |
Authentication
Settings related to authenticating with the RSS service.| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Authorization Type | The type of authentication to use with the RSS service. See the Authentication section for details. |
TLS Server Authentication
Settings related to verifying the TLS server’s identity.| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| TLS Server Certificate | The public key certificate used to verify the identity of a TLS server. You can upload a certificate, leave the field blank to allow the underlying OS/JVM to perform certificate validation, or set it to Any Certificate to trust the target server’s identity. Use Any Certificate with caution: the certificate verifies that you are connecting to the intended server. |
Advanced Tab
Advanced Settings
Settings not included in the previous categories.| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Include Channel | Whether to include data about the RSS channel in the output. |
| TLS Enabled Protocols | The list of TLS/SSL protocols supported when establishing outgoing connections. Best practice is to only use TLS protocols. Some obsolete operating systems do not support TLS 1.2. |
| Skip Processed Items | When enabled, the connector maintains a checksum of each item downloaded, and does not download the same content more than once. |
| Timeout | The duration in seconds to wait for a response from the RSS server before throwing a timeout error. |
| Processing Delay | The amount of time (in seconds) by which the processing of files placed in the Transactions tab is delayed. This is a legacy setting. Best practice is to use a File connector to manage local file systems instead of this setting. |
| Use ETag | Servers might include a checksum of the RSS content as the ETag (entity tag). Enable this setting to have the connector include the ETag from the previous response as the If-None-Match header in the outgoing request. |
Proxy Settings
Message
Logging
Miscellaneous
Automation Tab
Automation Settings
Settings related to the automatic processing of files by the connector.| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Receive | Whether the connector should automatically send RSS download requests according to a specified interval. |
| Interval | The interval between automatic requests. |
| Minutes Past the Hour | The minutes offset for an hourly schedule. Only applicable when the interval setting above is set to Hourly. For example, if this value is set to 5, the automation service downloads at 1:05, 2:05, 3:05, etc. |
| Time | The time of day that the attempt should occur. Only applicable when the interval setting above is set to Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. |
| Day | The day on which the attempt should occur. Only applicable when the interval setting above is set to Weekly or Monthly. |
| Minutes | The number of minutes to wait before attempting the download. Only applicable when the interval setting above is set to Minute. |
| Cron Expression | A five-position string representing a cron expression that determines when the attempt should occur. Only applicable when the interval setting above is set to Advanced. |
Alerts Tab
SLAs Tab
Establishing a Connection
A valid target Feed URL is required to establish a connection to any RSS service. Some services might also require authentication or a set of custom headers in order to consume the service. The connector silently supports both HTTP and HTTPS target URLs. If the target URL is an HTTPS URL, set the TLS Server Certificate to the public key certificate identifying the server. To implicitly trust the target endpoint, set the field toAny Certificate.
Authentication
The RSS connector supports HTTP authentication in the following formats:- Basic (plain text)
- Digest (encrypted)
- NTLM
- Negotiate
- Proprietary