Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Sixteen - RSS Settings In List Settings

Introduction

This article is the 16th part of my SharePoint series. Here are the links to my previous articles in this series.

In the previous article, I explained about retention system in list settings using which we can control the life cycle of our SharePoint list items or documents. We have seen how to enable and disable the retention policies in SharePoint. In this article, I am going to explain the RSS feature available in SharePoint. RSS applies throughout the site collection but in this article, I am going to cover RSS in the context of lists and libraries.

This article is dedicated to exploring the following topics

Background
Introduction to RSS
Enabling RSS from lists and site settings
Using RSS Feed
Disabling RSS
Including external site RSS feed in SharePoint
Summary

Background

Consider a scenario where you are a news addict. You want to get every news update. In that case, what do you do? You go to the news channel website and subscribe to the RSS feeds so that you don’t have to visit the websitesevery time and just read the latest news headlines if the headline is interesting for you, then you visit the website and read it in detail. Now, coming back to SharePoint, you have a SharePoint site and in that, you have maintained a list to capture new ideas. And you want to get a notification for every new idea entered by a user. Now, it is tiring, time-consuming, and not feasible to open the SharePoint site, navigate to the list, and see the items. So to solve this problem, SharePoint also provides the feature of RSS. Now, let’s explore in this article how RSS works in SharePoint.

Introduction to RSS

When RSS is enabled in SharePoint, you can manage RSS for the SharePoint list. It provides a list of all the items in SharePoint without loading the full SharePoint page with the master page and designs. You can even view it through a browser or even from RSS Viewer. There are several steps that you have to follow to use RSS in SharePoint.

Enabling RSS from lists and site settings

To enable RSS into the list, please follow the below steps.

Step 1. Open the list for which you want to see RSS. In my case, I have created a new list with the name RSS. Please note that if you are working with the Modern layout of SharePoint, you have to switch to the Classic layout first.

Just click on the List tab and then click the List Settings menu. It will open the List Setting page.

Step 2. Click on RSS settings under the Communication heading.

Step 3. It will open the RSS Settings page.

By default, the RSS will be enabled for a list. There are several options available here. Let us see all the options one by one.

Title: Title for RSS feed
Description: This will be the description of the RSS feed
Image URL: The image set here will be displayed with the RSS feed
Allow RSS for this list: Using this option, a user can enable or disable the RSS settings on the list.
Truncate multi-line text fields to 256 characters: When there are multiple text fields in the list, it may contain long textual data. If you want to display only the first 256 characters in the RSS feed, select the " Yes" radio button. If you want to display all the text, then select No. By default, it will be a number.
Columns: Here, every column available on the list will be available. From here, you can select which column should be displayed in the RSS feed. Also, you can select the order of the columns displayed.
Maximum items to include: Here, you can select how many items should be displayed in the RSS feed. By default, the value will be 25.
Maximum days to include: Here, you can select the number of days for which the items should be displayed in the RSS feed. If here you enter 7, then items created in the last 7 days will be displayed.

Step 4. Click on OK and the RSS feed will be enabled.

Using RSS feed

To view the RSS feed, please follow the below steps.

Step 1. Open the list in which you have just enabled the RSS feed. Make sure that you open the list in Classic mode. Click on List in the ribbon, then click RSS Feed.

Step 2. This will open the RSS feed in the browser. Here, you can see that there is no master page or any type of CSS loaded. It will display the information in plain text in Hyperlink format. Clicking on any item will open the item view form of SharePoint.

Disabling RSS feed

To disable the RSS feed, follow the below steps.

Step 1. Open the list in which you want to disable the RSS. Click on the List setting under the List tab in Ribbon.

Step 2. Click on RSS settings under the Communication heading.

Step 3. This will open the RSS Settings page. Just click on "No" in the "Allow RSS for this list" radio button. Then click on OK.

Step 4. Now the RSS is disabled. Now, to verify, open the list again. Click on the List tab from the ribbon and then check the RSS feed menu. This will be now disabled.

So in this way, we can disable the RSS feed from the list.

Summary

So in this article, we learned how we can enable the RSS feed for any list in SharePoint. Although I have explored the RSS feed for SharePoint lists, the steps are the same for the SharePoint document library. So you can follow the same steps in the SharePoint document library also to work with RSS. We have also seen how we can use RSS feeds for SharePoint in the real world. We can also view these RSS feeds into RSS viewer tools available in the market.

We can also display an external site's RSS feeds in SharePoint using the default RSS viewer web part. I will cover this in a separate article. If you have any questions regarding this or you are facing any issues while using the RSS feed in SharePoint, you can comment or leave your query in the comment section.