User control to display RSS channels

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• Download demo project - 6.25 KB

Introduction

This user control displays one or more RSS channels in an HTML table. It also includes a method (not used in the example) to download the content of the channel for later use. The difference between this control and other controls or services like rss-info is that the appearance of the control can be configured with the same CSS styles used in the rest of your application.

Using the Code

Include the user control in your app and add it to the desired page.

The control has these properties:

And a method:

Example use:

//This code is in the example aspx.cs page

string [] channels= new string[3];
channels[0] = "http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/usatoday-HorseRacing";
channels[1] = "http://www.horse-races.net/HRN-rssfeed.xml";
channels[2] = "http://news.google.com.mx/nwshp?client=firefox-a&rls" + 
              "=org.mozilla:es-ES:official&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=" + 
              "es&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:" + 
              "official_s&tab=wn&q=&output=rss";

Rssfeed1.urls = channels;
Rssfeed1.width = 150;
Rssfeed1.showContent = true;
Rssfeed1.showContentInHtml = true;
Rssfeed1.ChannelCss = "GrayBackgroundActive";
Rssfeed1.ContentCss = "NormalLetter";
Rssfeed1.LinkCss = "projectletter";
Rssfeed1.newsNumber = 3;

Points of Interest

The control uses a dataset to populate the table, and that dataset is filled directly from the RSS channel with the method ReadXml(), but some channels throw an error because the item "link" is repeated in the same node; when this happens, you will see an error.

In this case, you could use the method DownloadFeed of the control to download the content of the channel and parse it as you wish. But the control works fine with most RSS channels; in the sample code, the Google News channel and two othres are used.