Using Your Own Feeds

You don't have to use public Atom feeds, you can create your own. The collection field provides you with a simple standards-based means of integrating data from other systems into your Escenic publications. All you have to do is generate a correctly-formatted Atom feed in which:

The title element of each entry contains the label that you want to appear in the field.
Some other element of each feed contains the data item you want to store in the field.

Here, for example, is a very simple feed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <author>
    <name>my-site.com</name>
  </author>
  <id>http://my-host/my/first/feed</id>
  <link rel="self" href="http://my-host/my-first-atom-feed" type="application/atom+xml"/>
  <updated>2012-07-26T12:34:25.323Z</updated>
  <title type="text">My first feed</title>
  <entry>
    <id>http://my-host/my/first/entry</id>
    <title type="text">One</title>
    <content type="text">1</content>
    <summary type="text">The first</summary>
    <updated>2012-07-26T12:34:25.323Z</updated>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <id>http://my-host/my/second/entry</id>
    <title type="text">Two</title>
    <content type="text">2</content>
    <summary type="text">The second</summary>
    <updated>2012-07-26T12:34:25.323Z</updated>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <id>http://my-host/my/third/entry</id>
    <title type="text">Three</title>
    <content type="text">3</content>
    <summary type="text">The Third</summary>
    <updated>2012-07-26T12:34:25.323Z</updated>
  </entry>
</feed>

If this is referenced by the following collection field definition:

<field name="feedTest" 
  type="collection" 
  src="http://my-host/my-first-atom-feed" 
  select="content"
  mime-type="text/plain">
  <ui:label>My first feed</ui:label>
</field>

then Content Studio users will be able to choose between the display values "One", "Two" and "Three" when filling in the field. Selecting "One" will cause the value 1 to be stored in the field.

You can retrieve this field's value in your publication templates as follows:

${article.fields.feedTest.value}