I’m writing an Android app that is parsing RSS feeds from different sources. What I’m doing is, on a remote server, I’m consolidating all of the RSS feeds into one big XML file, then parsing that on the device (using a SAX parser), instead of going to each site individually. So I’m basically caching the RSS feeds for performance and it works pretty well.
What I want to do is give the user the option to select which feed sources they want to see. So if I’m caching Sites A,B,C, the user can select that they only want to see Sites A and C. I’m not sure the best way to setup the XML caching. I can either create smaller XML files or stay with the one big XML file and remove the items the user doesn’t want while parsing.
Not sure what the best design is for a mobile device. Is it more efficient to parse a bunch of smaller files or one big file.
One benefit I see of splitting the data into different files is that it is a one-time operation. So you split it up to different files the first time when you get it from the server (which might be slow), but if you re-use this data, you can simply load from the files and you don’t have to filter later. So it will appear speedier to the user when the choose an option A, B, or C.
But if you only use the data once, you no longer get this advantage.