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Tue, Sep 1, 2015

Technologies Used

PHP, Node.js, bash

Goal

The BEST Recognition Team has an established SharePoint process for receiving, reviewing and approving nominations for recognition. It didn’t make sense to uproot that entire process and try to replicate it on the BEST homepage with WordPress, so the idea was to take an export of newly approved nominees from SharePoint and import it.

Approach

SharePoint offers a fairly straightforward way to get an RSS feed of any list data, and importing RSS feeds into WordPress as posts is simple with a plugin such as WP Pipes. The main challenge here was the fact that SharePoint’s user column type dynamically displayed the users avatar and other info in SharePoint but only exported their name via RSS.

I had played with a Node.js module for Active Directory in the past, so I knew it could be used here. Originally, I was expecting the raw picture data to be stored in the traditional AD field “thumbnailPhoto,” but this wasn’t the case. Avatars are now stored “in the cloud” as a result of the move to Office 365.

Thankfully, the avatar URLs have a consistent format and only require the user’s email address as a parameter. The node script looks up the user by name (provided by SharePoint), gets their email address, then returns the avatar URL.

The Node.js script is configured to run on command with cgi-node.

The PHP script reads each RSS feed line by line. When a name is found, it requests the avatar URL from the Node script and inserts it into the item. It also makes a few formatting adjustments.

All of this is triggered by a cron job, which runs a bash script to curl the feeds coming from SharePoint and process them.

Status

Complete, in production.

Filed under Tech