Integrations - Integrating Web Feeds for Content

About This Article

In this article, we’ll run through how our clients can generate public web feeds for displaying their content held on Reward Gateway | Edenred elsewhere. This information is useful to all clients.

What a Feed Is

On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing people with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it.

Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by a news aggregator. A web feed is also sometimes referred to as a syndicated feed.

The Types of Feeds That Reward Gateway | Edenred Supports

Reward Gateway | Edenred supports the setup of the following types of feeds:

• RSS

• Atom

• JSON

How Clients Can Enable a Feed for Their Content

To enable a feed, clients should perform the following steps:

1. Log into Reward Manager

2. Go to the Integration Dashboard

3. Search for one of the feed types mentioned above (RSS, Atom or JSON) under the Explore Integrations tab

   

4. Select the integration and turn it on using the toggle button in the top right-hand side

5. Give the feed a name. The name a client gives to their feed might be displayed publicly on certain web feed readers, so they should be sure to set up a meaningful name.
6. Select the content they want their feed to display. Reward Gateway | Edenred currently supports creating two types of web feeds: A web feed of the Social Recognition Wall -> displaying social recognition moments; A web feed of the Blog Content -> showing company news/ updates, etc.
7. Select the refresh rate. This defines how often clients would like Reward Gateway | Edenred to refresh the content on the feed. Clients can choose between 5-30 mins or to never refresh the data.

Where the Created Feed Can Be Found

Once the feed has been set up, clients will be displayed a public url on the top of their integration page. This is ready to be used.

How Clients Can Secure Their Feed

Feed content is meant to be public. However, we understand that clients might want to keep this secure and secret. Therefore, once the feed is created, it is given a unique token which no one will know publicly.

Clients can choose to change this token routinely by selecting the re-generate security token option on screen. Please note this will also change your public feed url.

There is also rate-limiting on these urls, preventing anyone from trying to scrape information from them.

The Benefits of Creating a Feed for Your Content

All of the supported feed formats by Reward Gateway | Edenred are web standards and are widely used on the internet. Feeds can be set up so our clients can get all of their information in one place using feed readers (i.e. Feedly.com) and are automatically updating, proving invaluable for the reader.

Feeds can also be used to show the content of your program on a clients intranet platform. For example, if their intranet supports reading RSS, they can display their Social Recognition wall for their company to see publicly on the intranet to boost visibility.

Here are a few other places where a feed can be displayed:

• Web Feed Readers (Feedly.com, Feed.co etc)

• Feed Readers on Browser (Browser extensions to read feed content)

• Embed feeds on any public web site (Intranets)

• TVs (Most Smart TVs support reading feed content directly)

Useful Information

• The cached headers expire after 900 seconds.
• Caching data should be the responsibility of the user of the integration, if you try to fetch a feed before the cache expires we return a too many requests error response. Reward Gateway | Edenred does not cache the feed responses.
• We're often asked if we allow clients to use the If-Modified-Since header in their requests to our RSS feed. The answer is that we don’t make use of the If-Modified-Since header as we cannot cache the feed of every single client.
• The Refresh Rate in Reward Manager doesn't stop clients from trying to fetch the data more frequently. The refresh rate is just to tell the reader of the feed to refresh automatically after some time. We have set in place a counter of how frequently the feed was fetched. If you fetch it more than once in the span of 5 minutes we return a too many requests error response.
• The cached headers are a feature that was introduced on the 3rd of October, 2022. The rate limit was also introduced at this time.

Sharing Into SharePoint

Once a feed URL is accessed, we block any further traffic to this URL for the next 5 minutes. If anyone else tries to access it, our system will send the 429 error code and some feed readers may not show anything.

RSS feed readers should respect our system's response headers and include If-None-Match: **** header in their requests with the value of the last eTag header returned from our system.

For example:

1. The client sends a request to their feed URL
2. Our system returns their feed alongside a ETag: abc response header
3. Clients can try requesting their feed again by including If-None-Match: abc header in their request. (abc is just an example value.)
4. Our system will respond with the new content (if there are any updates) or it will return 304 response code when the content is not modified. If content is not modified, this has to be handled by the RSS feed reader and display the same content from the previous request.

If clients do not include this If-None-Match header in their request, our system can block their request for the next 5 minutes and they won't be able to get their feed content.

Examples and Resources

Here's an example of what the ETag looks like:

Here's an article from Microsoft about the If-None-Match header: [MS-ODATA]: If-None-Match | Microsoft Learn

When it's SharePoint, we usually send this article, since many of our clients have found it useful: How To Create an RSS Reader Using SharePoint News - HANDS ON SharePoint