The Item Builder Module allows you to rename and restructure different attributes of your data. The best way to describe its function is to show you an example.
In order for your data to show up in Yahoo Pipes, you have to name it accordingly. Pipes understands the attributes:
- Title
- Description
- Link
- Image
- (see the RSS Item Builder Module for more)
So lets say you wanted to convert a CSV file to RSS, here’s how you would do it:
In the Yahoo Pipes Debugger, our URL attribute is named “URL”. We need to rename this to “link” so Pipes knows that this is a hyperlink and can link to the appropriate file. Enter “link” on the left text box of the item builder, and “item.URL” on the right text box. Now Pipes knows that “link” equals “item.URL” (the original attribute name). The same goes for title and description. Whatever attributes you want to be your title and description, you need to rename accordingly. The Item Builder module will need to be placed in a Loop module for it to work properly. For now, just follow the example and I’ll explain the functionality of the Loop module in a bit.
In this example, lets take a look at a Twitter RSS feed for the search query “nfl training camp”:
As you can see, our “title” is the actual tweet. But for our sake, we want people to see the tweet, and offer them a direct link to the tweet on Twitter. So lets use the Item Builder Module to accomplish this.
Because we want our changes to apply to each item in the feed, we’ll put the Item Builder Module inside a Loop Module and connect our Fetch Feed Module like so:
Now lets take a look at the Item Builder Module and Loop settings. The first field is where we enter our desired attribute. The second field is for entering the current attribute (the one we’re going to change).
If you’ve attached your source to the Item Builder Module you will see a drop down list of current attributes for your feed.
The main attributes for an RSS feed are the title, description/content, link and image.
So lets turn our Twitter title into a link so users actually go to twitter.com.
We want our “title” to be the “item.link”.
Our “link” to be the “item.link” (so Yahoo rsPipes recognizes it as a hyperlink).
And our “description” as “item.description”.
We want to “emit all results” so they appear as title and link. We don’t want to “assign the results” because then the attributes would receive a different name – which would defeat the purpose of what we’re trying to do.
Now when we output our Pipe, we can view the tweets and hyperlinks (located in the title) to Twitter:
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