Blog Post

• Posted by:
• Richard Lee
• 3 comments
• 

In my previous article I described how to get a syndication feed but what I didn't describe was how to create a syndication feed of your own. In this article I will do just that using the .NET framework.

Firstly here is the method which accepts a collection of articles and creates a syndication feed. The article class should be easily constructed from the code sample below. LINQ in its simplest form is used to construct the syndication feed items; there are many articles on the web which will describe its workings.

public SyndicationFeed GetArticlesAsRss(IEnumerable articles)
{
	SyndicationFeed feed = null;

	if (articles != null && articles.Count() > 0)
	{
		const string companyUri = "http://www.avantprime.com";
		const string authorUri = "http://www.avantprime.com/about"; 
		const string feedDescription = "Feed description";
		const string companyName = "Avant Prime";
		const string companyEmail = "_info@avantprime.com";
		const string author = "Richard Lee";
		const string category = "Technology";
		const string title = "Articles";

		feed = new SyndicationFeed(companyName, feedDescription, new Uri(companyUri));
		feed.Authors.Add(new SyndicationPerson(companyEmail, author, authorUri));
		feed.Categories.Add(new SyndicationCategory(category));
		feed.Description = new TextSyndicationContent(title);

		feed.Items = articles
			.Select(article => new SyndicationItem(
								article.Title,
								article.Content,
								article.Url,
								article.SeekId.ToString(),
								new DateTimeOffset(article.CreatedDate)))
			.ToArray();
	}

	return feed;
}

Secondly output to the browser

ASP.NET MVC

public ActionResult Rss()
{
	var articles = ArticleModel.GetLatestArticles(10);
	return new RssResult { Feed = GetArticlesAsRss(articles) };
}

To get the RssResult class see the previous article

ASP.NET Webforms

var articles = ArticleModel.GetLatestArticles(10);
var feed = GetArticlesAsRss(articles);

Response.Clear();  
Response.ContentType = "application/rss+xml";  
Rss20FeedFormatter formatter = new Rss20FeedFormatter(feed);   
  
using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(Response.Output))  
{  
    formatter.WriteTo(writer);  
}  
  
Response.Flush();  
Response.End();

Please feel free to post your comments.