ASP.NET AJAX RC1 RSS Reader

December 17, 2006 · 2 min read

So the other day I was adding a “news page” to one of my projects and thought it was a great chance to play with consuming some other RSS feeds that had related information to what I was working on. So I started looking round and found the RSS Toolkit that had an RSS Data Source control that is perfect for consuming RSS feeds – the toolkit actually does much more, you should have a read on Dmitry’s blog (he wrote the toolkit and in on the ASP.net team) download the toolkit here.

I have also used the ASP.net AJAX Toolkit (which if you are unaware is a collection of controls for use with ASP.net AJAX, its an open source project with contributors from both MS and the community) the control I use is the so you can see a list of the Blogs and click each to reveal the text.

To use this you will need to have ASP.NET AJAX RC1 installed.

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Simple page layout using CSS, the right panel contains a Datalist control bound to the RssDataSource to display the blog items, the datalist control is wrapped in an asp:UpdatePanel. The item template in the datalist has a collapsiblepanelextender from the AjaxControlToolkit to display the description of the blog item.

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Chaging the selection of Blog to view fies the asp:UpdateProgress panel to display, the blog items are loaded and displayed.  You can see on the Blog list I have simply shaded the background of the

  • element to show the active blog.

    !

    The code for this is pretty simple with all thanks going to the AjaxControlToolkit team and Dmitry for the RSS reader.

    ASPX Markup

    List of blogs on the left....

    !

    DataList Control.....

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    C# Code Behind

    As you can see each Link button is hooked up to an OnCommand Event Handler and the argument identifies which blog feed to bind to the data source.

    !

    ....finally on the page I have added a little bit of Javascript to change the CSS class of the blog list item to indicate which one is active.

    If ele (the

  • element) is null I assume this is the first call and so the element will be list1.

    !

    Hope you find this as useful as I did - download the full source here.

    • This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Steve Clements

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