The notes, ideas, opinions and thoughts of a software and web developer

I was recently tasked with importing an RSS feed into a SharePoint site for display. As luck would have it, this task was one of the first I ever investigated in SharePoint – way back when 2003 was launched. As is typical, I didn’t write the method down, so had to start all over again – but at least I knew where to start this time!.

Here’s the basic XSL snippet you might typically start with to import an RSS 2 feed into the XML webpart;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
exclude-result-prefixes="xsl">
  <xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="rss/channel">
    <xsl:variable name="link" select="link"/>
    <xsl:variable name="description" select="description"/>
    <ul><xsl:apply-templates select="item"/></ul>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="item">
    <xsl:variable name="item_link" select="link"/>
    <xsl:variable name="item_title" select="title"/>
    <xsl:if test="position() &lt; 6">
      <li>
        <h3><a href="{$item_link}" title="{$item_title}"><xsl:value-of select="title"/></a></h3>
        <p><em><xsl:value-of select="pubDate" /></em></p>
        <p><xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes" /></p>
      </li>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

It’s worth pointing out that the IF statement is restricting the return to five items. It’s also worth noting that you could totally change the HTML to suit your own purposes.

Hopefully I’ll remember I wrote this up next time!