ASP.NET: Create an RSS Feed
From Wiki
Summary: Add an RSS Feed to your site
RSS feeds can be a useful way of letting your visitors see new content from your site. For example, I've added a couple on this site, one of which shows you a list of articles.
To create this on your site, add a new page entitled "rssfeed.aspx" and add this to the Page Load event:
- ' Declarations
- Dim dtList As New DataTable
- Dim intCount As Integer = 10 ' Number of records to show
- ' Set the content attributes
- Response.ContentType = "text/xml"
- Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8
- ' Use an XmlTextWriter to write the XML data to a string...
- Dim sw As New StringWriter
- Dim writer As New XmlTextWriter(sw)
- ' write out the rss and version
- writer.WriteStartElement("rss")
- writer.WriteAttributeString("version", "2.0")
- ' write out <channel>
- writer.WriteStartElement("channel")
- ' write out <channel>-level elements
- writer.WriteElementString("title", "ASP.NET Library - Articles")
- writer.WriteElementString("link", "http://aspnetlibrary.com")
- writer.WriteElementString("description", "A list of articles from the ASP.NET Library")
- writer.WriteElementString("ttl", "60")
- ' Insert your code here to get the data
- dtList = ...
- ' write out an <item> element for each result
- For i As Integer = 0 To (intCount - 1)
- ' write out the start <item> element
- writer.WriteStartElement("item")
- writer.WriteElementString("title", dtList.Rows(i).Item("MyTitleField").ToString)
- writer.WriteElementString("link", "http://aspnetlibrary.com/articledetails.aspx?articleid=" & dtList.Rows(i).Item("MyIDField").ToString)
- writer.WriteElementString("description", dtList.Rows(i).Item("MyDescriptionField").ToString)
- writer.WriteElementString("author", "Mark Smith")
- writer.WriteElementString("posted", dtList.Rows(i).Item("MyCreatedOnField").ToString)
- ' write out closing </item> element
- writer.WriteEndElement()
- Next
- ' write out closing </channel> element
- writer.WriteEndElement()
- ' write out closing </rss> element
- writer.WriteEndElement()
- ' close the writer
- writer.Close()
- ' write out the xml directives and the rss feed string
- Response.Write("<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""ISO-8859-1""?>")
- ' You can also specify an xsl sheet if needed
- ' Response.Write("<?xml-stylesheet type=""text/xsl"" href=""~/stylesheets/rssTemplate.xsl""?>")
- Response.Write(sw.ToString())
- ' Clean Up
- writer = Nothing
- sw = Nothing
As I mentioned above, you can see this in action here so to get a working example on your site, you'll need to:
1. Add the code that you use to connect to your database (in the section with the comment "Insert your code here to get the data").
2. Customise the sections where I have referenced my site and set the database fields in the "item element" loop.
3. Make sure you import the System.IO, System.Xml and System.Data classes.
This Hack is part of the ASP.NET Hacks collection
