RSS Feeds Internals

How does it work?

When you try to manually refresh an RSSFeed instance using either one of the following functions:

• Refresh(): refreshes the RSS feed using the current feed type and the current feed URL

• Refresh(string, RSSFeedType): refreshes the RSS feed using the specified feed type and the specified feed URL

Nettify attempts to fetch the feed content from the URL. After this happens, the XML document loader loads the content from the stream containing the XML response for the RSS feed information.

Before parsing starts, Nettify verifies the feed type by checking to see if the relevant tags exist for each RSS version:

• For RSS 2 feeds, rss element is checked.

• For RSS 1 feeds, rdf:RDF element is checked.

• For Atom feeds, feed element is checked.

If verification succeeds, Nettify will attempt to read both the title and the description from the feed info before going deep into the articles. Nettify will look for the following nodes:

• For RSS 2 feeds, item node in <channel> and <item> instances are checked

• For RSS 1 feeds, item node in <channel> or <item> instance is checked.

• For Atom feeds, entry node in <feed> instance is checked.

Nettify then goes on to make a new instance of the RSSArticle class with the following necessary information:

• Article title: title node

• Article link: link node

• Article summary: summary, content, or description node

It also checks to see if the embedded summary or description is in the HTML format or the text format. If the article is in the HTML format, it will try to extract the text from the HTML code found within the article description.

If applicable, it also fetches all the article parameters. Nettify then returns a new instance of the RSSArticle class with the above information installed.

Finally, the new RSSFeed class instance with the information about the feed is returned.