Question

I am working on a small widget for BlogEngine.Net. My widget is going to take a person’s shared items atom feed and print the title, website url, date, and atom url. To complete this task, I have begun to use Linq and XML.

Here is the problem. The atom feed Google Reader uses is located in the source element, which has an attribute of gr:stream-id. Apparently, the XName does not like having colons in the name. I had to go that route because the Google Reader schema does not exist. If I had that schema, it would solve my issue. How can I get the schema?

Below is a small snippet of my code so far:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {     //Replace userid with the unique session id in your Google Reader      //url (the numbers after the F)     getFeed('userid'); }  public class Post {     public String title { get; set; }     public DateTime published { get; set; }     public String postUrl { get; set; }     public String baseUrl { get; set; }     public String atomUrl { get; set; } }  private void getFeed(String userID) {     String uri = 'http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F' + userID + '%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast';      XNamespace atomNS = 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom';     //The Google Reader schema link does not exist :(     XNamespace grNS = 'http://www.google.com/schemas/reader/atom/';     XDocument feed = XDocument.Load(uri);      var posts = from item in feed.Descendants(atomNS + 'entry')                 select new Post {                     title = item.Element(atomNS + 'title').Value,                     published = DateTime.Parse(item.Element(atomNS + 'published').Value),                     postUrl = item.Element(atomNS + 'link').Attribute('href').Value,                     atomUrl = item.Element(atomNS + 'source').Attribute(grNS + 'href').Value                 };     foreach (Post post in posts) {         output.InnerHtml += 'Title: ' + post.title + '<br />';         output.InnerHtml += 'Published: ' + post.published.ToString() + '<br />';         output.InnerHtml += 'Post URL: ' + post.postUrl + '<br />';         output.InnerHtml += 'Atom URL: ' + post.atomUrl + '<br />';         output.InnerHtml += '<br />';     } } 

If there is another way to go about this while still using Linq and XML, please let me know. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I did find an alternative solution to getting the atom feed url. However, I would still prefer to use the Google Reader Atom Schema because that would provide a bit clear code.

In the atom feed, there is an id element, which looks like this:

tag:google.com,2005:reader/feed/http://www.domain.com/blog/rss.xml 

So I added the following to my Linq code:

atomUrl = getUrl(item.Element(atomNS + 'source').Element(atomNS + 'id').Value) 

With getUrl looking like this:

private String getUrl(String item) {     if (!item.Equals('')) {         return item.Substring(item.IndexOf('http://'));     }     return ''; } 

That code return http://www.domain.com/blog/rss.xml

This solution seems to run around the use of namespaces, but it gets the job done.