Learn to Consume RSS Using DevX's New Content Feeds : Page 2

Transforming the RSS Feed to HTML
Now that you've obtained the RSS document, you need to write the instructions to display the contents. There are a number of sites on the Web that will perform RSS-to-HTML transformations for you, and DevX exposes the feeds as HTML directly, in a form suitable for inclusion in an <IFRAME>. However, you can easily construct your own XSLT stylesheet to customize the display. For example, the following template creates a 300-pixel wide <div> containing the feed data, with the item titles formatted as links.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<! -- match the root element -->
   <xsl:template match="/">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="rss" />
   </xsl:template>

<! -- match the rss element -->
   <xsl:template match="rss">
      <xsl:if test="@version != '2.0'">
         <div id="error">
            Unrecognized RSS feed version.</div>
      </xsl:if>
      <xsl:if test="@version = '2.0'">
         <xsl:apply-templates select="channel" />
      </xsl:if>
   </xsl:template>

<! -- match the channel element -->
   <xsl:template match="channel">
      <div id="feed" style="width:300">
         <a>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
               <xsl:value-of select="link" />
            </xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:attribute 
                name="target">_blank</xsl:attribute>
            <h2>
               <xsl:value-of select="title" />
            </h2>
         </a>
         <br />

         <div style="font-size: xx-small">
            <xsl:value-of select="copyright" />
         </div>
         <br />

         <div id="items">
            <xsl:apply-templates select="item" />
         </div>
      </div>
   </xsl:template>

<! -- match the item element -->
   <xsl:template match="item">
      <div>
         <a>
            <xsl:attribute 
               name="target">_blank</xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
               <xsl:value-of select="link" />
            </xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="title" />
         </a>
         <br />
         <xsl:value-of select="description" />
      </div>
      <br />
   </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The stylesheet shown above has four templates that matches the main RSS elements—the ubiquitous root template (match="/"), which matches the root node of the document, the <rss> element, the <channel> element, and the <item> element.

• When the parser encounters an <rss> element, it checks the version attribute value. If it's not 2.0, the stylesheet returns an error; otherwise, it parses the <channel> element
• When the stylesheet encounters the <channel> element, it creates the 300-pixel wide <div> tag and displays the value of the channel <title> element, formatted as a link (using the <link> element as the link destination), and the copyright notice. Next, it performs the<xsl:apply-templates select="item" /> command, which selects each <item> element, in turn.
• When the stylesheet encounters an <item> element, it displays the title as a link and the description.

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