In this article, we will outline what's changed in the Data Feed Manager in Qompose — how feed settings are now organised, and the new filtering, sorting, and formatting capabilities available on your feeds.
Feed properties are now organised into tabs
Opening a Data Feed's properties now presents four tabs: General, Playback rules, Advanced, and History.
Only relevant fields are shown for your feed's connector type
Previously, every feed type showed the same full set of properties regardless of what kind of feed you'd configured. Now, only the fields relevant to your selected Type are shown — for example, a URL-based feed shows URL, Login, and Password, while other connector types show only what they actually need.
Data Feed Fields for Google Calendar in Qompose | Data Feed Fields for Google Calendar in QL2 |
| 
|
Altering the input date format for date-type columns
Historically, in some instances where date values from imported Data Feeds are not using a standardised ISO format (such as YYYY-MM-DD), this had caused issues when making use of that data (sometimes resulting in a FALSE or NULL value).
In Qompose, you can determine which ISO format the feed you are importing uses, which improves the platform's ability to understand the data being imported. To do so:
Open the Datafeed menu in the Content Library
Right-click on your chosen Datafeed, then click Edit
Click the column header for any Date-type field
Ensure that under the Type drop-down, Date is selected
Choose the feed's Format from the available options, this will vary depending on the input source
You can also select Custom to further define in the event that the desired ISO format is not available from the drop-down
Press Save to confirm your settings
Please Note
The above functionality specific to non-Navori feeds only.
Changing the display format of Date fields
Should you wish to re-arrange the Date data from your Datafeeds, you can do so within the Template Designer. See our interactive walkthrough below.
Open the Template Designer
Drag and drop a Date data field from your chosen Datafeed onto the canvas
In the Zone Properties for your Datafeed Zone, find the DATE + TIME section
Choose your desired format from the Format drop-down
Sorting your feed
Under Playback rules, the Sorting section lets you define how your feed's records are ordered — and you're no longer limited to a single sort column. Click + Add to add further sort levels, each with its own Sort by column and Direction (Ascending/Descending). Sorting is applied in the order the rows are listed — in the example below, records are sorted by title first, then by pubDate within that.
In addition, the Lookup allows you to refine your sorting parameters and apply them to a specific subset of items (in the screenshot below, our sorting will apply only to feeds that contain "sleep" in the title column).
Please Note
Sorting only affects the order your data is delivered and displayed on your media Players — it does not reorder the rows shown in the Data Feed Manager's own table view.
Conditional Formatting
Another powerful upgrade to Data Feeds is the Formatting options in the Advanced tab of the Data Feed Properties.
This allows for comprehensive conditional formatting via rules that can be applied to sets/groups. Multiple sets of rules can be used at one time (by clicking the +Add button for every new rule added), and each rule can have actions tied to it (in our example, any feed that identifies a title containing "Sleep" will colour the cell background red when displayed on media players).
Not only this, but some of the additional actions that can be carried out when matches are identified include:
Changing the font family
Changing the font size
Changing the font foreground colour
Changing the font style (normal/italics/underline)
Changing the font weight
Changing the text alignment
Changing the cell colour background
Changing the animation of a text
Changing whether data is visible or hidden
Summary
With connector-aware field visibility, custom date formatting, multi-level sorting, and a more powerful Lookup rule builder, configuring a Data Feed now shows you only what's relevant and gives you far more control over how your data is filtered, sorted, and delivered to your Players.