by Heathesh
10. May 2010 22:26
I found a decent RSS news feed that was free (http://freenewsfeed.newsfactor.com/rss) and was looking at integrating it into my new blog design. In order to do this I wanted to create a simple class that would read an RSS feed based on a URL passed in, and I thought the best way to do this would be to first create a class I could use to store the RSS feed items. So I created the following:
/// <summary>
/// RSS feed item entity
/// </summary>
public class RssFeedItem
{
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the title
/// </summary>
public string Title { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the description
/// </summary>
public string Description { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the link
/// </summary>
public string Link { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the item id
/// </summary>
public int ItemId { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the publish date
/// </summary>
public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the channel id
/// </summary>
public int ChannelId { get; set; }
}
Next I needed a manager class that would read any RSS feed and populate a list of the above rss feed item object with the relevant data. To achieve this I created the following static class:
/// <summary>
/// RSS manager to read rss feeds
/// </summary>
public static class RssManager
{
/// <summary>
/// Reads the relevant Rss feed and returns a list off RssFeedItems
/// </summary>
/// <param name="url"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static List<RssFeedItem> ReadFeed(string url)
{
//create a new list of the rss feed items to return
List<RssFeedItem> rssFeedItems = new List<RssFeedItem>();
//create an http request which will be used to retrieve the rss feed
HttpWebRequest rssFeed = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
//use a dataset to retrieve the rss feed
using (DataSet rssData = new DataSet())
{
//read the xml from the stream of the web request
rssData.ReadXml(rssFeed.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());
//loop through the rss items in the dataset and populate the list of rss feed items
foreach (DataRow dataRow in rssData.Tables["item"].Rows)
{
rssFeedItems.Add(new RssFeedItem
{
ChannelId = Convert.ToInt32(dataRow["channel_Id"]),
Description = Convert.ToString(dataRow["description"]),
ItemId = Convert.ToInt32(dataRow["item_Id"]),
Link = Convert.ToString(dataRow["link"]),
PublishDate = Convert.ToDateTime(dataRow["pubDate"]),
Title = Convert.ToString(dataRow["title"])
});
}
}
//return the rss feed items
return rssFeedItems;
}
}
I was all set, all I had to do now was pass in a URL of an RSS feed, and I would be returned a list of rss feed items...
Happy rss-ing!