How to feed RSS into your ASP.Net application using Repeater control?

In this blog post, I will show you step by step illustration on how to feed RSS into the ASP.Net application using Repeater control.

What is Repeater Control?

The Repeater control is used to display a repeated list of items that are bound to the control. The Repeater control may be bound to a database table, an XML file, or another list of items.

What is RSS?

         RSS (RDF Site Summary) is a family of web feed formats used to publish/post frequently updated works like blog entries, news headlines, audio and video in a standardized format. For more information refer: RSS_Wiki

An example document in RSS format

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>RSS Title</title> <description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description> <link>http://www.someexamplerssdomain.com/main.html</link> <lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000 </lastBuildDate> <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate> <ttl>1800</ttl> <item> <title>Example entry</title> <description>Here is some text containing an interesting description.</description> <link>http://www.wikipedia.org/</link> <guid>unique string per item</guid> <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate> </item> </channel> </rss>

The best way to learn more about RSS is go through the xml contents of the feed.

How to add RSS - step by step:

Step 1: Create an empty website and add a Default.aspx web page.

Step 2: Add data repeater control.

  

















Step 3: Select new Data source in smart tag.

Step 4: Add xml data source.

Step 5: Configure XML data source and provide details as in below screenshot.

Here for RSS feed we are going to provide following details

Data file: provide the RSS blog post feed link from MSDN

Ex: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/MainFeed.aspx?Type=BlogsOnly

XPath: rss/channel/item

Step 6: In Source view of the aspx page, Add below item template code in repeater control.

<asp:Repeater ID="Repeater1" runat="server" DataSourceID="XmlDataSource1"> <ItemTemplate> <a target="_blank" href='<%# XPath("link") %>'> <strong> <%# XPath("title").ToString()%> </strong></a> <br /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:Repeater>

Step 7: Compile and run

Output:

On an additional Note, you can also view the description of the blog along with the title by using below code in source.

<asp:Repeater ID="Repeater1" runat="server" DataSourceID="XmlDataSource1"> <ItemTemplate> <a target="_blank" href='<%# XPath("link") %>'> <strong> <%# XPath("title").ToString()%> </strong></a> <br /> <%# XPath("description").ToString() %> </ItemTemplate> </asp:Repeater>

Note: No code behind involved.

References:

• Blog on adding RSS http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benko/archive/2011/11/30/adding-an-rss-feed-to-a-site-or-how-to-use-the-xmldatasource-and-a-repeater.aspx
• BLOG Basic XMLDataSource and Repeater tutorial http://beecy.net/post/2009/04/17/Making-XmlDataSource-Work-with-RSS-10-RSS-20-and-Atom-Feeds.aspx
• BLOG Working with XPath queries http://www.willasrari.com/blog/create-keyword-filtered-rss-feeds-using-xmldatasource/000107.aspx
• BLOG XPath Syntax http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_syntax.asp
• MSDN XPath Reference http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256122.aspx
• MSDN XPath Examples http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256086.aspx

In my next post, I will show the steps on how to feed Atom into ASP.Net