Feeds

Moksha makes it simple for applications and widgets to efficiently obtain data from arbitrary RSS/Atom feeds. The moksha Feed object transparently handles the fetching, parsing, and caching of feeds, making it trivial to pull in and manipulate external data sources in your application.

When used within the Moksha Platform, the Feed object will utilize the central global moksha.feed_cache. When used outside of the platform, it will automatically use a local sqlite database cache.

API usage

The Feed API provides a flexible Feed object that can be utilize in many ways.

Rendering a url with the Feed object

from moksha.api.widgets.feed import Feed
feed = Feed('myfeed')
feed(url='http://lewk.org/rss')

Note:Usually you would instantiate a single Feed object somewhere in your project, and just call it with a url when rendering it in your templates.

Subclassing

You can easily subclass the Feed widget and provide your own url.

from moksha.api.widgets.feed import Feed

class MyFeed(Feed):
    url = 'http://foo.com/feed.xml'

myfeed = MyFeed('myfeed')
myfeed() # renders the widget.  usually done in the template.

As a child Widget

By defining your Feeds as children to a widget, ToscaWidgets will automatically handle setting a unique id for your Feed object, as well as giving you the ability access it in your template from the c context object.

from tw.api import Widget
from moksha.api.widgets.feed import Feed

class MyWidget(Widget):
    myfeedurl = 'http://foo.com/feed.xml'
    children = [Feed('myfeed', url=myfeedurl)]
    template = "${c.myfeed()}"

As a generator

You can also utilize the Feed widget as a generator, giving you the ability to iterate over the entries as necessary.

from moksha.api.widgets.feed import Feed

feed = Feed('myfeed', url='http://foo.com/feed.xml')
print '%d entries' % feed.num_entries()
for entry in feed.iterentries():
    print entry.title

Using the moksha feed cache by hand

The moksha Feed widget automatically handles fetching and caching your feeds using the global moksha feed cache. The moksha middleware automatically handles setting up this object, and making it available for all of the applications and widgets. Moksha utilizes Doug Hellmann’s feedcache module, which intelligently handles all of the hard work for us.

Here is an example of using the feed cache to manually fetch a feed.

import moksha
feed = moksha.feed_cache.fetch('http://foo.com/feed.xml')
for entry in feed.entries:
    print entry

Note:The moksha.feed_cache object is a paste.registry.StackedObjectProxy instance, and is setup by the moksha.middleware.MokshaMiddleware before each request reaches your application. Thus, it only works during requests and cannot be used without using the MokshaMiddleware.