Feeds as OData

[Aaron Powell]

Off the back of the changes to the tag/ category stuff, it pretty much neutralizes the need for building feeds, so what I was thinking is that we should make the Feeds actual an OData service. This way you can go to /feeds/ and get everything (well latest 10 or what ever) but you can then build up custom OData links off there for specific notions, say posts tagged as Umbraco, or posts tagged with a tag combination, etc.

Means that people can subscribe feeds on what posts of yours they are actually interested in, not just what you want to expose
Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Have you had any experience with generating OData feeds from NHibernate (or from anything other than EF), Az? It looks relatively simple if you already have an entity-framework data model, but otherwise I’m not sure.

[Aaron Powell]

I haven't done it yet, but it can't be hard. Friend of mine wrote this: http://odataforumbraco.codeplex.com/ which uses LINQ to XML

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Man, OData feeds (particularly updatable ones) would truly turn FunnelWeb into a “real developers’” blog. That’s bleeding edge right there.

[Aaron Powell]

hah and cuz the URLs are translated to LINQ statements it's even more awesome!

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Andrew Tobin]

Just out of interest - I checked out the Umbraco implementation and it says that it is just implementing the "SELECT" which I am assuming (possibly incorrectly) that it just means you can grab out of the source...

Assuming it's just as difficult to develop an odata scenario around nhibernate, to implement all the filters and things, that means either moving the backend onto EF, or ditching the idea of odata.

Now, given the scenario you're discussing, being able to customise feeds - you'd end up with a scenario that someone could choose "dotnet and wpf but not asp" but how do you interpret that - possibly easy enough, but how would you build the url for that feed?

The common guy going to your blog just wants a main feed, if they want to do something else you could provide it pretty easily, but you'd need a feedbuilder page just to handle it.

Plus that basic query, you could express and handle in code pretty easy /feed?and="dotnet,wpf"&not="asp"

The higher level filtering would be a bitch to implement - so I'm just wondering in what scenarios you could see yourself using it, where the investment in this would pay off?

[Aaron Powell]

I think in hindsight I'm going to actually have to agree with Andrew on this. As cool as a query API against our post/ tag system would be it might be a lot more work than is currently justifiable.

Having basic tag filtering using controllers should be a problem, allowing urls such as:

/feeds/mvc/umbraco

That would generate a feed which contains my MVC posts which are also tagged with Umbraco. This can be achieved by a wildcard route and it comes in as an object array, or maybe we could write a model binder to turn it into a proper collection.

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com