Question

I have a MySQL table and I want to pick certain columns to create RSS Feed from it. How to do it using Ruby or Rails or Gems?

Answer 1

Depending on what I was trying to do, I would probably just go for a simple Ruby script. I would use ActiveRecord so I didn’t have to write any SQL. Then I would use either Builder or RubyRSS to generate the feed.

Connecting ActiveRecord to a MySQL server directly is as simple as:

require 'active_record'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
:adapter => "mysql",
:host => "localhost",
:username => "myusername",
:password => "mypassword",
:database  => "mydb"
)

Then you are free to define ActiveRecord models like you would in a regular Rails app.

There are RSS generator examples on the RubyRSS website and a Builder one on the Railscasts website.