shawnwildermuth / rsssyndication

.NET Core library for building RSS Feeds

RssSyndication

.NET Core library for building RSS Feeds

Available as a Nuget Package for ASP.NET Core projects:

• WilderMinds.RssSyndication

Example

// using WilderMinds.RssSyndication;

var feed = new Feed()
{
  Title = "Shawn Wildermuth's Blog",
  Description = "My Favorite Rants and Raves",
  Link = new Uri("http://wildermuth.com/feed"),
  Copyright = "(c) 2016"
};

var item1 = new Item()
{
  Title = "Foo Bar",
  Body = "<p>Foo bar</p>",
  Link = new Uri("http://foobar.com/item#1"),
  Permalink = "http://foobar.com/item#1",
  PublishDate = DateTime.UtcNow,
  Author = new Author() { Name = "Shawn Wildermuth", Email = "[email protected]" }
};

item1.Categories.Add("aspnet");
item1.Categories.Add("foobar");

item1.Comments = new Uri("http://foobar.com/item1#comments");

feed.Items.Add(item1);

var item2 = new Item()
{
  Title = "Quux",
  Body = "<p>Quux</p>",
  Link = new Uri("http://quux.com/item#1"),
  Permalink = "http://quux.com/item#1",
  PublishDate = DateTime.UtcNow,
  Author = new Author() { Name = "Shawn Wildermuth", Email = "[email protected]" }
};

item1.Categories.Add("aspnet");
item1.Categories.Add("quux");

feed.Items.Add(item2);
      
var rss = feed.Serialize();

Let me know if you have any questions or issues!

rsssyndication's Issues

<pubDate> is using localized dates which disagree with RFC 822

Preamble

The RSS specification states:

Element	Description	Example
pubDate	The publication date for the content in the channel. For example, the New York Times publishes on a daily basis, the publication date flips once every 24 hours. That's when the pubDate of the channel changes. All date-times in RSS conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, with the exception that the year may be expressed with two characters or four characters (four preferred).	Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:00:01 GMT

So, let's take a look into RFC 822, Part 5: Date and Time Specification. Note that it strictly specifies the universal, non-localizable date format. E.g. the day of week and month names shouldn't be localized according to that format.

Fable

So, I'm using RssSyndication in my national environment, and it generates output such as <pubDate>Вс, 12 фев 2017 00:00:00 +0700</pubDate>; note some of the words are in Russian. I believe it should use the English words instead.

Permalinks incorrectly serialize to <guid>

Permalinks serialize to <guid>. If the Guid field is filled out in the Item, it is not serialized.

Add functionality to include Atom namespace to RSS for max. compatibility

For maximum compatibility with RSS readers, W3C recommends adding the atom namespace to the rss feed.

W3C validator (https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi) will say:

This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.: Missing atom:link with rel="self"

For example this code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Shawn Wildermuth's Blog</title>
    <link>http://wildermuth.com/feed</link>
    <description>My Favorite Rants and Raves</description>
    <copyright>(c) 2016</copyright>
    <item>
      <title>Foo Bar</title>
      <link>http://foobar.com/item#1</link>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Foo bar&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <author>[email protected] (Shawn Wildermuth)</author>
      <guid>http://foobar.com/item#1</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2019 12:48:26 GMT</pubDate>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

should turn into:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
  <channel>
  <atom:link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://www.example.org/linktofeed"/>
    <title>Shawn Wildermuth's Blog</title>
    <link>http://wildermuth.com/feed</link>
    <description>My Favorite Rants and Raves</description>
    <copyright>(c) 2016</copyright>
    <item>
      <title>Foo Bar</title>
      <link>http://foobar.com/item#1</link>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Foo bar&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <author>[email protected] (Shawn Wildermuth)</author>
      <guid>http://foobar.com/item#1</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2019 12:48:26 GMT</pubDate>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Basically "just" adding these two extra lines:

<rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
<atom:link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://www.example.org/linktofeed"/>

I am not sure how to do this myself but any feedback would be great.

In asp core 2.0 data should be serialized to xml format instead of simple text.

The workaround:

...
var rss = feed.Serialize();

XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml(rss);

return this.Ok(xml);

Lastest version as NuGet?

Hi,

Thanks for some awesome software!

By the looks of it, the current NuGet does not include the item enclosures, correct? Could you push a new NuGet version?

Will use the source for now.

Thanks!

Encoding would be better as UTF-8

XML is encoded as UTF-16. UTF-8 is more widely supported, I would consider changing it to UTF-8 or allowing the encoding to be specified.