Written on October 13th, 2009 by iby

Building a RSS reader in ASP.Net

Posted in .NET, Development, Random Post Tags: , , , ,

Hi

RSS Feeds are just XMLs – so building a RSS reader is not so difficult, first you know how to do it ;-)

Let’s start with looking at C# function that reads the RSS Feeds.

First step is to collect the feeds. This is done by using WebRequest:

System.Net.WebRequest myRequest = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(rssURL);

System.Net.WebResponse myResponse = myRequest.GetResponse();

 
System.IO.Stream rssStream = myResponse.GetResponseStream();

System.Xml.XmlDocument rssDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();

rssDoc.Load(rssStream);



Now that we have collected the feeds, we are able to process the XML (rssDoc).  In my example I would like to run though the items and then write the title.


This would look something like this:


System.Xml.XmlNodeList rssItems = rssDoc.SelectNodes("rss/channel/item");

 
string title = "";

string link = "";

 
for (int i = 0; i < rssItems.Count; i++)

{            

    title    = rssItems.Item(i).SelectSingleNode("title").InnerText;

    link     = rssItems.Item(i).SelectSingleNode("link").InnerText;            

 
    Response.Write("<p><a href='" + link + "' target='new'>" + title + "</a><br/>");

 
    Response.Write("</p>");

}


That’s all, now you have a function that can collect the Feeds.



Please Notice – not all Feeds have the same XML format. They can/will differ from Feed provider to Feed provider.



Now lets take a closer look on the ASP.Net page.


<%@ Page Language="C#" %>

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

 
<script runat="server">

    public void GetFeed(string rssURL)

    {

	//Put here the code descriped ealier in this section

    }

</script>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head runat="server">

    <title>mibuso Feeds</title>    

</head>

<body style ="font-family: Tahoma,Arial,Verdana,Helvetica;">

    <form id="form1" runat="server">

        <div>        

            <%                

                rssUrl = "http://www.mibuso.com/forum/smartfeed.php?forum=23&firstpostonly=1&limit=NO_LIMIT&count_limit=10&sort_by=postdate_desc&feed_type=RSS2.0&feed_style=HTML";

 
                Response.Write("mibuso Feeds<br />");

                GetFeed(rssUrl);

            %>

        </div>

    </form>

</body>

</html>


Here we assume, that the above C# function is called GetFeed. This function must be added in a script section and can afterwards be called from the body section.



Next you place the asp.net page on the internet server. When calling it – you should get a result like this:

RssFeeds-AspNet



That’s all, now you have a ASP.Net page, that collects the feeds and show the title.

															

							
						
							

								
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