CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlrssfeedatom-feed
haden
haden

Reputation: 164

Detecting new new items in a RSS feed

What is the best way to detect when a feed has been updated? Say I have an application which polls the feed every 15 minutes. How do I find out if new content has been added or not? For RSS as well as Atom feeds.

Upvotes: 15

Views: 4524

Answers (3)

seric
seric

Reputation: 11

I am using etags on my project, computed in a servlet filter as shown here http://www.infoq.com/articles/etags

This would work for rss, atom or any other resource hosted on your webserver.

Upvotes: 1

Guffa
Guffa

Reputation: 700740

Each item in RSS 2 and Atom has a GUID/ID that may be flagged as unique. If it's flagged as unique you can use it to identify items and match against the previous items.

Upvotes: 6

Zed
Zed

Reputation: 57678

Check the Last-Modified and ETag fields of the http response when requesting the field. Even better, use the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match tags in your request, and you will only get a 304 response if the feed hasn't been modified. (see: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html)

Upvotes: 5

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