Rss and Atom framework and Extensions

Question

We have many nice Rss and Atom frameworks. Personally i like Argotic Framework from CodePlex.

But the problem is in diversity of extensions (see http://rss-extensions.org/wiki/Main%5FPage). First feed may be created without extensions, second with only itunes, and third with itunes, media and so on. Sometimes an item can consist of short description and full story at the same time.

I want to reduce this Zoo just to single tag without data loss (e.g. by putting together description and content of media extension from youtube feed)

Argotic framework has GenericFeed but it useless for me because it just ignores extensions at all.

The system works as follows: a server application loads the contents of the feed and transforms it to the general form and saves in a database. Then, in response to a request from a client ASP.NET web site loads this generalized content from database and sends to the client in JSON format.

What is the best way to generalize or distill such a kind of feeds(with many different extensions) on server side so that i can send to client javascripts just simple object in JSON format {title: "title", description: "description" ..}?

Sorry for my English :-). I tried to write without mistakes.

Answer 1

I wrote my own layer (one item-class one feed class and also a funnel-class for merged feeds) on top of Argotic to handle extensions and other exceptions from the feed format "standards". Pubdates are particularly bad.

First i get the genereic feed. Then, based on feed type and origin i process the feed-formad specifiv argotic objects (Rssfeed Atomfeed), and finally, if necessary, i extract data from the xml source itself.

If you know your sources, this is the way to go since you can get what you expect.

I hope this will get you moving.