Question

Im creating an rss feed for my site and going with this way of building it:
http://www.developerzen.com/2009/01/11/aspnet-mvc-rss-feed-action-result/

Im just not sure how do new feed get pushed to it though?

eg for a site like digg.com suppose everyday you want to publish the top 5 most dugg items in the last 24 hours everyday at 8am.. how would i go about doing something like that?

thanks

Answer 1

It’s up to you to generate those SyndicationItem instances and return them. In the example they have hardcoded a SyndicationFeed and a SyndicationItem but in a real application you would fetch this information from your database and generate multiple SyndicationItem dynamically. For example:

public ActionResult Feed()
{
    var feed = new SyndicationFeed(
        "Test Feed",
        "This is a test feed",
        new Uri("http://Contoso/testfeed"),
        "TestFeedID",
        DateTime.Now
    );
    IEnumerable<YourModel> topItems = _repository.GetTopItems();
    IEnumerable<SyndicationItem> syndicationItems = topItems.Select(
        item => new SyndicationItem(
            item.Title,
            item.Description,
            new Uri(item.Url),
            item.Id,
            DateTime.Now
        )
    );
    feed.Items = syndicationItems;
    return new RssActionResult() { Feed = feed };
}

Now the subscribers of your syndication feed /somecontroller/feed will always get the latest information directly from your data store.