Re: [Informa-developer] Extending RSS

[Niko S. <ni...@na...>]

On Thursday 07 October 2004 09:47, Pratt, Jerald wrote:
> I'm looking to extend the base RSS 2.0 feed with some additional elements
> that I need for my application.  I've seen in the RSS 2.0 documentation
> that this is legal to do as long as I use namespaces to declare the
> elements that I want to use.  For instance I want to add a ExpirationDate
> to <Item> elements that declare a date-time when an Item expires and can be
> removed.  The new element would be something like <xyz:ExpirationDate>.
>
> The problem is I don't see any support for parsing and exporting any
> extension elements using the Informa libraries.  Is this doable (did I miss
> something)? 

This is not supported at the moment, I'm sorry. But your feature requirement 
is very understandable, and we should take care about better supporting those 
issues in the future (although this will have quite some impact, since many 
aspects from parsing, object tree and exporting are concerned). A somewhat 
"generic" approach for handling such extension attributes should be 
introduced. A map storing key (String) - value (String or even Object) pairs 
may be could be used for arbitrary extension fields.

> If this is not supported, are there any ideas of how to do 
> this in case I get motivated enough to add this support?

As drafted above, I would recommend to start with the RSS 2.0 parser, then add 
support in the ItemIF for the extension properties (as Map), implement it (at 
least on the basic level, even better at also for the hibernate backend :-), 
and at last point adapt the RSS 2.0 exporter to reflect your changes.

Please let me hear if sounds doable for you and what you think.

-- Niko