The RSS Item Builder Module works similar to the “Item Builder” module and the “Create RSS” module. It allows you to turn a non-RSS data source into an RSS feed by renaming the attributes in Yahoo Pipes. To use it, enter a data source in a “Fetch Data” module, YQL module, or Fetch Page module. Now open a Loop module and drop the RSS Item Builder module in it and connect the two modules together. The RSS Item Builder will pick up the attribute names from your data source and provide you with a drop down list. Now depending what attributes you have and want to rename, select them from the dropdown list. Doing this will convert your data source into an RSS feed and make it ready to mash up.
The RSS Item Builder Module is similar to the Create RSS Module except that it allows each attribute to be wired so you can take values from other modules.
In this example, we’re going to take an XML feed and turn it into an RSS feed using the RSS Item Builder Module.
We’ll be working with a Ticketmaster affiliate XML product feed for NHL tickets:
http://chilliwackdesign.com/yahoopipes/fetchdata.xml
First we have to enter our data into the Fetch Data Module and narrow down our data by entering “product” as the “path to item list”. (We can tell we need a “path to item list” by looking at the Debugger pane and seeing that we can’t drill down the data we want until we first click on “product”).
This is what it looks like in the Debugger pane:
Then we will place the RSS Item Builder Module into the Loop Module (because we want to work on every item in the feed) and connect the Fetch Data Module to it.
Tip! We know we can only use the RSS Item Builder within the Loop Module because it has no input terminal.
Now we can start assigning the proper RSS attributes to our XML feed by selecting them from the drop down menus.
Our “Title” can be the name of the team, so by looking at the Debugger pane, we can tell that we want to assign either “level1”, “product_code”, or “product_name” as the “Title”. (In this XML feed, those attributes all happen to be the same thing).
We can assign:
“buyat_short_deeplink_url” as our “Link”
and
“image_url” as our “media.content.url”.
We also want to “emit all results” like so:
This is what our newly named attributes look like in the Debugger pane:
As we talked about earlier, what makes the RSS Item Builder different than the Create RSS Module is the fact that we can wire different values in. Lets take our feed one step further and allow users to input the height and width dimensions of the images in our RSS feed. All we need to do is wire in a Number Input Module (explained in the next section) to the “media content” “height” and “width” attributes.
First lets setup our Number Input Modules. We need one for “height” and one for “width” like so:
Tip! If the height and width properties are both the same, only one will be specified in the Debugger pane.
Now all we have to do is wire them into the “height” and “width” attributes of the RSS Item Builder Module:
Now we have a customizable RSS feed. This was just one example of you can allow users to customize the RSS feed, but there are unlimited possibilities, you just have to use your imagination!
Here’s what our feed looks like in the Debugger pane, with the “media.content” attribute drilled down so you can see the new customizable attributes for our image:
We’ve now created a customizable RSS feed that’s ready to be saved and published!
Recent Comments