Django Syndication with Colddirt II

Published on June 3, 2007

Since I've already covered a really simple syndication example, I'll move onto something a little more complex. Let's say you want to offer syndication that is slightly more custom. The Django syndication docs give an example from Adrian's Chicagocrime.org syndication of beats. I had to ponder a minute to get "custom" syndication to work, so here's my example from start to finish.

First, as usual, feeds.py

feeds.py

class PerDirt(Feed):

    link = "/"
    copyright = 'Copyright (c) 2007, Blog Mozaic'
    
    def get_object(self, bits):
        from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
        if len(bits) != 1:
            raise ObjectDoesNotExist
        my_dirt = get_object_or_404(Dirt, slug__exact=bits[0])
        return my_dirt

    def title(self, obj):
        return obj.slug
    
    def description(self, obj):
        return obj.description
    
    def items(self, obj):
        from django.contrib.comments.models import FreeComment
        return FreeComment.objects.filter(object_id=obj.id).order_by('-submit_date')

You can see that this differs slightly from the simpler syndication example. I'll not a few things. But first, I need to show urls.py:

urls.py

feeds = {
    'mydirt': PerDirt,
}

    (r'^feeds/(?P<url>.*)/$', 'django.contrib.syndication.views.feed', {'feed_dict': feeds}),

Let's pretend the dirt word (or if you were doing a blog, you could do this based on slug) is "nifty". So, the process is like this: a request comes in as /feeds/mydirt/nifty/ -- it is first looked up in the feed_dict (because of the mydirt part) and then sent to PerDict. Once in PerDict it hits the first def, get_object. One of the things that confused me at first is what the 'bits' part is. Simply put: it is the crap after you tell Django which feed to use. Similar to the beats example, I'm testing to make sure the length is only one -- so if the word doesn't exist or somebody just types in feeds/mydirt/nifty/yeehaaa/ -- they will get an error. Next the object is looked up, in this case the dirt word (in your case, maybe a blog entry).

The title and description are self-explanatory. The items are a query from the FreeComment database, ordered by date. What we need next is the correct templates.

templates/feeds/mydirt_title.html

Comment by {{ obj.person_name }}

Once again, the filename is important (mydirt_title). obj.person_name is the name from the comment.

templates/feeds/mydirt_description.html

{{ obj.comment }}


Posted by: {{ obj.person_name }}

Published: {{ obj.submit_date }}

And that is the comment.

templates/dirt_detail.html

If you are curious how to get that little orange icon next to your site's url, you do this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Dirt" href="/feeds/mydirt/{{ dirt_object.dirtword }}/" />

That's it. Hopefully I've explained how to create somewhat custom syndication feeds, in case you needed another example.

Tagged as: django | xml

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