RSS files can be generated using Active Server Pages (ASP). It is OK for an RSS file to have a .asp suffix. In this example an RSS 0.91 file is generated, but it could easily be applied to other RSS versions. Similarly in this case the site stores its articles in a Microsoft Access database, but the database connection could be changed to reflect a Microsoft SQL Server database.

You can follow the example below or if you prefer you can download it in a text file here. You may get an XML error when you try and open the text file, just view source to get the code

Sorry, I got a bit off hand with this tutorial. Though I saw some really horrible examples today on how to show an RSS feed using XMLDom so I just couldn?t stand not writing something about it. Imagnine a script that selects all nodes (XPath query was something like ?//*?), not carring where in the document, then looping them thru looking at their names and guessing what they are and then adding them to four separate strings with some weird separator. After doing this, they split the strings into four arrauys and started looping out the content. Oh please, it was horrible. No real sense of XML at all I?m afraid . I know there are better resources then that on the net, but I still felt I had to contribute with just one more.

If you never heard of RSS earlier, you are ethier very ignorant to what happens on the web these days and/or you are stuck running Internet Explorer which lacks any built in support for it. It all comes down quite easy though. An RSS feed is an online news syndication in the XML format. The main idea is to have a standardized way to share news over the net. I for an instance offers my articles as an RSS feed so people easily will know when I?ve written something new. For those who want to dive deeper into RSS I would recommend ?What Is RSS? over at XML.com.

I thought that it might also be a good idea to show a short RSS feed with only one news item in it so you know what source we are working with

This is the second article in my series about XML, XMLDom and ASP. For those who missed the first it?s avaible here

In my first article I showed how to parse an XML document using XMLDom and displaying the data. In this second tutorial I?ll show two different ways to retrieve an XML document from a remote server using ASP and ServerXMLHTTP.

XML is a great way to share information. However, if you want to be able to share it people will need to retrieve the data from you somehow (or you from them). For this purpose we have an object called XMLHTTP or, if used on a server, ServerXMLHTTP. Since both XMLDom and XMLHTTP are part of MSXML2 they can cooperate very nice. XMLDom can by auto use XMLHTTP to retrieve information and if you use XMLHTTP it can by auto return a XMLDom object with the retrieved XML data.

The easiest way to retrieve XML from an external site is to let the XMLDom handle it all. This requries the least amount of code and I would guess that it?s also a tiny bit more effective resource wise. Here is how to do it:

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML can be used in many ways and one of which is 'data storage'. This is the one we will be exploring in this article. XML along with XSL ( Extensible Stylesheet Language ) can by used to present data on the web pages. XML provides the data and XSL allows us to present it the way we want. Remember though that not all browsers support XML on the client side, only Micrsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and above support XML. XML can also be used to perform RPC ( Remote Procedure Call ). Actually this capability of XML to allow communication between distant applications is so strong that Microsoft has developed SOAP ( Simple Object Access Protocol ) specification which uses XML to allow communication between remote applications. XML can be used for a lot more purposes which I haven't mentioned here. Also keep in mind that Microsoft's future .NET platform will make use of XML even more than any tool does today. ASP+, ADO+ and others will use XML to define and present data. So if you are comfortable with XML today, it will help you in the near future when you will be getting yourself ready to develop applications in the revolutionary platform called Microsoft .NET.

If you want to generate a datagrid (figure 1) that will display and navigate through the plants information, simple procedure to accomplish this in ASP will be as follows: