Coldfusion RSS Atom Feed: CFML for Making, Creating, Generating, Valid RSS

One of the things about 'helpful blogs' that show you code is that sometimes, they show you little snippets of code. You have to basically already know everything about the subject in question, already know how to put everything together, already know how to call it, and THEN yes, that little snippet of code in the middle will be helpful. What that mostly means is that a lot of people searching will find page after page of how-to and not be able to use any of them.

I was feeling less oblivious than usual when I found Pete Freitag's old Sep 2005 blog post on 'How to Create an RSS Feed', but reading the comments made me feel better. First he left a ton of people in the dark and then he didn't respond to much of any of them. This is the honor of being a code guru I guess. Anyway, since I managed (thanks to him, and to one of his comments, and to further tweaking using the validator and trying-again) to get it working, I thought I would post the full code for my solution for others.

Possibly helpful points for new folks:

• Generating an RSS feed (information about your website) is ONE thing; actually reading that RSS into a page is ANOTHER different thing.Two separate scripts/efforts.
  
• Getting the RSS to take a user to choose their reader etc. to put that RSS into, is merely a matter of calling the file -- I mean providing the link to your file with that RSS XML in it.
  
• If you have to use CFML to generate your code for the XML, then obviously, it has to be sitting in a .cfm file. It turns out it doesn't matter what the file extension is--as long as the XML inside it is recognized/validated as an RSS feed.

So we have the first part, akin to technical META headers:

1. XML version and encoding tag
2. RSS version and content type tag; I'm using an IF statement from Pete F there from a different one of his blog posts
3. CHANNEL tag which opens the feed
4. Atom link with application type tag
   

The next section is the RSS equiv of non-tech, content-based META headers:

5. TITLE the actual title of the feed itself, maybe same as website
6. LINK the link to the website the feed is representing
7. DESCRIPTION basic info about what this site/feed is
8. LASTBUILDDATE this is "lastupdate" info about the overall feed itself. Since mine is building from the datatable when called I put Now() on it.
9. LANGUAGE that's pretty obvious I think
   

The next section is the actual content of the feed -- in my case, looping records from a CFQUERY call.

Note that any CFML code I needed to put in here, I put to the right of a basic tag -- so it would not mess up the display of the XML itself when generated to the final file, except the query cfoutput which I let take up lines so the output would display better in code. I have no idea if this is necessary, it just seemed like the thing to do... now I'm thinking, probably doesn't matter. I dunno. You can try it without that.

10. ITEM open tag
11. TITLE the title of this individual record, post, entry, etc.
12. LINK this is the link to the individual record, post, entry, etc. so if someone clicked it, it would take them right to the page in question. (In my case this is behind a login but oh well. If logged in, the link works fine.)
13. GUID with the isPermalink parameter--for me this is the same as the item above.
14. PUBDATE the date of the individual post/entry/etc. in question.
15. DESCRIPTION whatever description, listing, etc. you want for the item in question
16. ITEM close tag
    

and when the loop is finished then

17. CHANNEL close tag
18. RSS close tag
    

and you're done.

You will want to post your code file to your remote server and then go to a validator and enter the link to it, so it can check it for you. The validator I used is: http://feedvalidator.org/

Some notes on the details of this code that might be useful:

• It wants date formats in this format: #DateFormat(Now(), 'Ddd, dd mmm yyyy')# #TimeFormat(Now(), 'HH:MM:SS')# EST although it would prefer GMC timezone.
• The XML must be perfect and there's a good chance that something, at least your 'description' area, might violate that once inawhile, with a character it doesn't accept. There are two different ways to deal with this, and I used them both, nested:
• The CDATA tag, and XMLFORMAT function, which looks like this in practice:
• <![CDATA["#XmlFormat(myquery.mydescription)#"]]>
• although you'll note in the code below I had other info in there and a few separate calls to the function. Note that Pete's article had an error in this part, but blessedly some commenter corrected it or I would have been there all night I imagine.
  

The full code is below, albeit with query details changed.
The link to this code in practice is: http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/rss1.cfm

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<cfif cgi.user_agent contains "Mozilla"><cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/xml"><cfelse><cfheader name="Content-Type" value="application/rss+xml"></cfif>
<channel>
<atom:link href="http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/rss1.cfm" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<title>Remote Viewing at Ten Thousand Roads: TKR at the Dojo Psi</title>
<link>http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/</link>
<description>Double-blind Remote Viewing Sessions Posted at TKR</description>
<cfset nowdt = "#DateFormat(Now(), 'Ddd, dd mmm yyyy')# #TimeFormat(Now(), 'HH:MM:SS')# EST">
<lastBuildDate><cfoutput>#variables.nowdt#</cfoutput></lastBuildDate>
<language>en-us</language><cfquery ... name="dslist" maxrows="50">select id, entrydt, tasktype, target, method from mytable where ... order by entrydt desc </cfquery>
<cfoutput query="dslist"><cfset target = "#trim(dslist.target)#">
<item>
<title>#XmlFormat(variables.target)#</title>
<link>http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/rv/galleries/peanutview.cfm?dsid=#dslist.id#</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.dojopsi.com/tkr/rv/galleries/peanutview.cfm?dsid=#dslist.id#</guid><cfset dst = "#DateFormat(dslist.entrydt, 'Ddd, dd mmm yyyy')# #TimeFormat(dslist.entrydt, 'HH:MM:SS')# EST">
<pubDate>#variables.dst#</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA["RV #XmlFormat(dslist.id)# > Type: <cfif dslist.tasktype is 2>Practice<cfelseif dslist.tasktype is 6>Mission<cfelse>Solo</cfif> > Method: #XmlFormat(dslist.method)#"]]></description>
</item>
</cfoutput>
</channel>
</rss>

Hope this helps someone else someday.

I'll have to be doing the script to compile and display an RSS feed at some point, and I'll post it when I do.

PJ
.

Date Loops for a ROTA

As part of the ROTA application I had to build a very simple way for a user to say, "Starting on this date, assign something weekly for X weeks." This meant I had to get the start date, the quantity of weeks, write the dates and then loop them in as rows in a table. Later I'd use the row IDs for the outside of a nested loop to assign people to these date-events.

Not much time to explain laboriously here but am posting my code just in case it ever helps someone searching.

I get from a form the qty of weeks and the start date.

<cfset rotaweeks = "#form.rotaweeks#">
<cfset rotadt = "#dateformat(form.rotadt,'mm/dd/yyyy')#">

I actually go back a week so the script can then regularly go forward a week in the loop.

<cfset newday = #DateAdd("d", -7, "#variables.rotadt#")#>
<cfset newdaylist = "">
<cfoutput>
<cfloop from="1" to="#variables.rotaweeks#" step="1" index="i">
<cfset newdayA = #DateAdd("d", 7, "#variables.newday#")#>
<cfset newday = "#DateFormat(variables.newdayA,'mm/dd/yyyy')#">
<cfset newdaylist = "#ListAppend(variables.newdaylist, '#variables.newday#')#">
</cfloop>
</cfoutput>

That leaves me with a list of dates. I set and format some vars for the edges of that date range.

<cfset firstdt = "#ListFirst(variables.newdaylist)#">
<cfset afterA = '#DateAdd("d", -1, "#variables.firstdt#")#'>
<cfset after = '#DateFormat(variables.afterA,"mm/dd/yyyy")#'>
<cfset lastdt = "#ListLast(variables.newdaylist)#">
<cfset beforeA = '#DateAdd("d", 1, "#variables.lastdt#")#'>
<cfset before = '#DateFormat(variables.beforeA,"mm/dd/yyyy")#'>

<cfset listqty = '#ListLen(variables.newday)#'>

I give users the option to remove all previous entries from that date range.

<!--- if checked, remove previous entries for this team between those dates (if they are replacing/modifying the rota) --->
delete from myrotatable WHERE
teamid = #variables.teamid#
and rotaid = #variables.rotaid#
and rotadt > '#variables.after#'
and rotadt < '#variables.before#'

Then the dates get written into rows in a table

<!--- then insert the dates in table --->
<cfloop list="#variables.newdaylist#" index="ii">
insert into myrotatable
(rotadt, rotaid, rotateamid, ...)
values
('#ii#',#variables.rotaid#,#variables.teamid#, ...)
</cfloop>

I can grab the record IDs of those dates and loop through them, sub-looping my list of userIDs, to create the rota. See the post Rota, Dynamic Variables and Nested Links for the rest of it.

ROTA, Dynamic Variables and Nested Loops

Fresh from the land of nobody-can-help-me-I'm-doomed, I discovered (as usual) that I was trying to make something a lot harder than it needed to be. Hate it when I do that. Then the relief of solving it is tempered by knowing I was an idiot and it should have been obvious in the first place. In any case, onward:

I never knew why I might 'need' something like 'dynamic variables' but here is where I did. I've been working on a ROTA. This is a list of user assigned slots/dates. A baseball team lineup is a good example of a rota. A list of three kids and the chores they take turns doing, or a few employees and the tasks they take turns doing, would be a rota.

In my application, there are "teams" (groups) of people who change off weekly setting up a fun assignment for the rest of the team. This means in my case, there are generally far more dates (weekly assignments) than people (team members), so there is the big loop through dates and then the smaller sub-loop through the members, which repeats until all the dates are filled.

Example:

John (userID 93), Jane (userID 156), and Alex (userID 418) are the team;
The dates are weekly, every Monday for 7 weeks.

So when we end this we should have something like:

week 1: john (93)
week 2: jane (156)
week 3: alex (418)
week 4: john (93)
week 5: jane (156)
week 6: alex (418)
week 7: john (93)

This was easy to code except I screwed up the dynamic variables part. Just overcomplicated it.

In general the building process worked like this:

* build rota info including settings, rota name and rota ID, start date and qty of weeks
* get team info including list of user IDs, Aliases and team ID
* show team members for a drag&drop sequence (see Drag & Drop Sortable Lists)
* that list is going to post as a list of the userIDs: form.userid = 93,156,418

Then on the next page the assignments happen.

These team members are being looped in sequentially, and this is going to be controlled with a simple counter variable. So up top we set a list of our user IDs in dynamic variables using the counter. That way, LATER when we are doing the loop through dates, we can use the counter to rebuild what the variable should be named and then evaluate the name to get the user ID.

<!--- set up a numbering list for the user IDs. eg 'theuser2' = 156. --->
<cfset counter = 1>
<cfset qtyusers = "#ListLen(variables.userlist)#">
<cfloop list="#variables.userlist#" index="i">
<cfset "theuser#variables.counter#" = "#i#">
<cfset counter = #variables.counter# + 1>
</cfloop>

* query for the record IDs of the list of dates, now we have a list to big-loop through

To see how I created the weekly dates, see Date Loops for Rota

* our list of user IDs is our small list to sub-loop through

<cfset counter = 1>
<cfloop query="myquery">
<!--- we have fewer users than events. user numbering starts over. --->
<cfif variables.counter GT variables.qtyusers><cfset counter = 1></cfif>
<cfset thisuserA = 'theuser' & '#variables.counter#'>

{another query here gets user info}
then the query that updates the record says:

update table SET
rota_userid = #evaluate(variables.thisuserA)#

<cfset counter = #variables.counter# + 1>
</cfloop>

And that's it. I really can't believe that I've started and stopped on this several times over 3 years -- previously it was insanely complicated. A couple months ago the solution fell into my head and I thought "wow, so simple!" and I wrote the code superquick, and it worked perfectly right up till the end -- when it crashed and burned on the dynamic variable.

It was telling me the dynamic variable I had set was not found. Even though I could display both its name and its value right above the line where it insisted it didn't exist. It turned out to be something funky about the way I'd been coding it that the evaluate function was crashing against. The above code works fine.

PJ