Introduction to RSS Settings in List Settings in SharePoint

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 about the RSS feature available in SharePoint. RSS applies throughout the site collection but in this article, I am going to cover RSS in context of lists and libraries.

In this article, I am going to explain,

• 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 addicted. You want to get every news update. In that case, what you do? You go to the news channel website and subscribe to the RSS feeds so that you don’t have to visit the websites every time and just read the latest news headlines and 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 the notification for every new idea entered by a user. Now, it is really tiring, time-consuming, and not feasible to opening the SharePoint site, navigating to the list and seeing the items. So in order 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 SharePoint list. It provides a list of all the items in SharePoint without loading full SharePoint page with Master-page and designs. You can even view it through 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

In order 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 name RSS. Please note that if you are working with the Modern layout of SharePoint, you have to switch it to the Classic layout first.

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

Step 2

Click on RSS settings under Communication heading.

Step 3

It will open 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.

• 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 multi-line text fields in the list, it may contain long textual data. If you want to display only first 256 character in RSS feed, select “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 last 7 days will be displayed.

Step 4

Click on OK and the RSS feed will be enabled.

Using RSS Feed

In order 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, the 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 with Hyperlink format. Clicking on any item will open the item view form of SharePoint.

 

Disabling RSS Feed

In order 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 List tab in Ribbon.

Step 2

Click on RSS settings under 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, in order to verify, open the list again. Click on List tab from the ribbon and then check 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 same for the SharePoint document library. So you can follow the same steps in 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 into SharePoint using default RSS viewer web part. I will cover  this in a separate article.

Any question or feedback or suggestion, please do comment and let me know.