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Access Application Data from an Outside Web Site

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If you add a List Publisher module to a Microsoft Office Live Small Business public-facing Web site, the application list data that you publish is also available to Web sites outside of Office Live Small Business. This is true because, by default, an RSS feed of the published list data is automatically created.

This RSS feed is a collection of the items being displayed in the view of the list that was published to the Web site. Office Live Small Business list feeds use the RSS 2.0 specification and Simple List Extensions to make it easier for you to access and process this collection of items.

The RSS Feed Contents

In the RSS feed, each row of data from the underlying list is formatted as an RSS item. Each column from the row of data is placed in the description under the item, wrapped in a <div> tag, and formatted as a name:value pair. For example:

<item>
    <title>Hamburger</title>    <description>
        <div>
            <b>Title:</b> Hamburger
        </div>
        <div>
             <b>Price:</b> $5.99
        </div>
        <div>
            <b>Category:</b> Sandwich
        </div>
    </description>
</item>

You can use an XML parser to drill into the content within individual <item> and <description> tags to get to the data from your published list. However, because the data is essentially unstructured, your parser must do a fair amount of work to scrape out the name:value pairs in the column names and data.

A simpler approach is to use the XML parser to look for the ol: namespace nodes. Because this uses the Simple List Extensions specification, the list data is also separately contained in nodes outside of the RSS description. Each list column is included in the RSS feed with the following syntax:

<ol:ColumnName>Data</ol:ColumnName>

So, using the previous example, the data described in the code above is also included in the file in this format:

<ol:Title>Hamburger</ol:Title>
<ol:Price>$5.99</ol:Price>
<ol:Category>Sandwich</ol:Category>

Your code can look for the ol: namespace nodes in the feed to get to the data much more easily than it can scrape the unnecessary formatting tags, such as the <div> and <b> tags included inside of the <item> and <description> tags.

Each list column is included in the RSS feed with the following syntax:

<ol:ColumnName>Data</ol:ColumnName>

For schema information for each list, library, and workspace in Office Live Small Business, see Schema Reference.

Procedures

View the XML supporting an Office Live Small Business RSS feed

  1. Publish a list to an Office Live Small Business Web site. For more information, see Publish a List on a Web Site

  2. Open the Web site to the page that contains the List Publisher module that was added in step 1.

  3. In the lower right corner of the module, click Subscribe to feed. A new Web page opens, displaying the data from the feed.

  4. On the page displaying the feed, right-click, and then click View source.

See also

Display Contact Manager Data on a Web Site
Publish a List on a Web Site

Schema Reference