This is one of those cool features that happened by accident, as I wanted to list the lastest Sueetie.com news (the Sueetie.com blog RSS feed) on the redesigned Admin Home Page and needed a smart approach to displaying RSS feeds in Sueetie. I think you’ll agree I’ve found one.
Here’s the new Admin Home Page displaying the Sueetie News Feed.
I didn't want a one-time feed display control for the Admin Home Page, but something I could add to the Sueetie Framework to be used over and over again. It needed to be customizable, easy to use, and following the existing patterns of displaying lists in Sueetie, that is, the Sueetie List View Control Pattern.
There's a fair amount of information about Sueetie List View Controls. Here’s the Sueetie List View Control Wiki page and a Wiki page on List View Cache Management. Examples of using the List View Controls can be found on the Sueetie.com Home Page for Sueetie News, Site Activity, Discussions and Wiki Updates. There are also List View Controls for blog comments and media objects.
Sueetie List View Controls are VERY easy to use as you can see how the Rss List control is used below. All you have to do is specify the FeedUrl and you’re good to go.
Like all Sueetie List View Controls, there’s a theme-specific HTML view file that gives you control of the layout and fields displayed, with full Intellisense support. Here’s the HTML view file for the Rss List View Control.
For a bit of background on the Rss List View design, when I was doing my research on consuming feeds I stumbled on ASP.NET Team Member Dmitry Robsman’s ASP.NET RSS Toolkit. This thing is SWEET! What I did for the list view control was to create a strongly typed class for BlogEngine.NET RSS feeds which populates a SueetieRssBlogPost generic list for the List View Control.
All of the Rss Feed List View Control logic is identical to the other List View Controls except for the fact that the container is populated from an RSS Channel instead than SQL. And from sharing the same List View logic (and extending the RSS Toolkit class logic), the feed channel items are cached for better performance rather than pulling from the originating source on each display.
I hope those of you waiting for Sueetie 2.0 don’t mind this slight diversion into List View Fun for a day. Hopefully you’ll find it useful to display a feed anywhere you want on your Sueetie 2.0 site.