RSS Reader Web Control

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Introduction

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds are becoming very popular these days. People need Country News at their own commercial websites. Today the most powerful websites are being developed in ASP.NET due to the fact that ASP.NET provides Web Controls that enable the Software Reuse property of Software Engineering Models. RSS Reader Control may be just dragged and dropped on web forms, can be linked to an RSS Feed and it will display a smooth, cool, and scrolling interface to the Feeds.

Background

The main power behind creation of such feeds is XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML is a structured language, thus provides support for the structured sharing of data. XML documents are built under a specific format. An example of such a document is as follows:

RSS Feeds work in the same way. Today News Agencies update a specific document on a daily basis. The same document is provided an interface in the websites. So the websites always have the latest contents of news. Obviously the creation of such documents is not easy as far as their property of being case-sensitive is concerned. Today, there are many XML editors available in the market. The structure of RSS Feeds is a standard and is unique around the world. A sample RSS Feed looks like this:

A detailed description on RSS can be found here.

RSS Reader provides an interface to such a document. It extracts the XML from the specific documents, implies the scrolling effects to the contents read.

Using the Code

To use RSS Reader, you will need to add RSS Reader to your tool box by locating the RSSReader.dll. Once RSS Reader is in your tool box, you will need to drag it to the page. You will also need to provide the URL where to fetch news from. Different CSS classes may also be applied for a good interface of the control. Since the header, content area, and footer are purely editable and styleable, you will have the option to design the control to your requirements and likings. The list of properties is as follows:

• HeaderText: The Text to appear as the control title, e.g. Country News
• HeaderCssClass: The CSS Class to apply on Header
• RSSHeading: The Text to appear as heading for the news inside the control, e.g. News
• RSSHeadingCssClass: The CSS Class to apply on news heading
• RSSNewsCSSClass: The CSS Class to apply on the contents of news
• FooterText: The Text to appear in the footer of the control. e.g. News from http://www.thenews.com.pk
• FooterCssClass: The CSS Class to apply on the footer of the control

After setting the properties, the control will look like this:

Points of Interest

Since the XML document is the data source for the control, it should be in the standard format, so that the control is able to read the contents. The Case Sensitivity of XML may also be of a great concern.

History

• 23^rd March, 2008: Initial post