API - RSS feed for mobile apps

Introduction

The RSS feed API purpose is to allow mobile applications to display a news entry point linked to an existing customer RSS feed. Mobile applications will be able to fetch news from this feed and display the information. This API is an alternative to the News module of gomanager, that allow organizers (festivals, trade-shows, venues. etc.) to directly input their news in gomanager. It may be used if a customer already has an existing RSS feed and wants to avoid duplicate work by inserting news manually in gomanager.

This document describes the interface the RSS feed needs to follow.

How it works

Principles

The RSS feed will be called directly by mobile applications. The format used is RSS 2.0 (https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/RSS2.html) and mobile applications will parse a subset of child elements of item.

Attribute	Description	Type
title	Item’s title. Must be contained inside a CDATA section.	text
description	Short description or subtitle for the item. Must be contained inside a CDATA section.	text
image	Item’s image, will appear as thumbnail in the list of news articles. Maximum size is 500x500 px.	text
content	Item’s body. Must be contained inside a CDATA section. Body can include HTML content (div, img, ...). If the body includes an “object” tag for Flash content (Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo), it is highly recommended that you replace it with a link (which contains either a video thumbnail and/or video title) redirecting to the video URL. Not all mobile devices (Android, iOS) are capable of displaying Flash content.	text
pubDate	Publishing date for the item. Recommended format is EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z (http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/datetime)	text
link	Link to the official website page hosting the item. Must be contained inside a CDATA section.	text

Encoding

XML documents must be UTF-8 encoded which means all the characters contained in the documents must be properly encoded using the UTF-8 encoding, and your service should include the following header in all the XML documents it exposes:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Any other character encoding may prevent the import service from working, or introduce visual glitches in mobile or web applications. Moreover, XML files must be well-formatted according to the W3C rules. Please use the W3C validator (https://validator.w3.org/feed/) to validate your XML files if any parsing error occur. Finally, all texts should be contained in CDATA sections and should not have their HTML escaped before being put in the CDATA section.

Security

There is no security feature implemented to fetch the RSS feed. If information is sensitive, a basic auth can be implemented on a per project case.

Sample

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>  
<rss version="2.0"> 
	<channel>
		<item> 
			<title><![CDATA[title]]></title> 
			<description><![CDATA[subtitle]]></description>  
			<image><![CDATA[http://mywebsite.com/image_news3.png]]></image>
			<content><![CDATA[<div><p><strong>lorem</strong></p><div>]]></content>
			<pubDate>Tue, 29 Oct 2013 12:45:10 +0000</pubDate>
			<link><![CDATA[http://mywebsite.com/news.php?id=3]]></link>  
		</item>
		<item>
		...
		</item>  
	</channel>  
</rss>