Creating rss feed with Coldfusion

[Mattastic]

Hi,

I'm getting the following xml errorswhen I'm trying to do this, can anybody
help?

----error----
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
Line Number 2, Column 114: SELECT * FROM news_articles ORDER BY
article_id DESC; </cfquery><cfsavecontent VARIABLE="theXML"><cfoutput><?xml
version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?><rss version="2.0">

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------^
-----end error---




Thanks in advance

----code attached----

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="yes">
<cfquery name="newsArticles" datasource="news" username="#dsn_username#"
password="#dsn_password#">
SELECT * FROM news_articles ORDER BY article_id DESC; </cfquery>
<cfsavecontent VARIABLE="theXML">
<cfoutput>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?><rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title></title>
<link></link>
<description></description>
<copyright></copyright>
</cfoutput>
<cfloop FROM="1" TO="#newsArticles.recordcount#" index="i">
<cfscript>

body = replace(newsArticles.body[i],"<","&lt;","ALL");
body = replace(body,">","&gt;","ALL");
body = replace(body,"&","&amp;","ALL");
body = replace(body,"","","ALL");
date = dateformat(newsArticles.date_created[i], "ddd, dd mmm yyyy");
author = replace(newsArticles.author[i],"<","&lt;","ALL");
</cfscript>
<cfoutput>
<item>
<TITLE>#newsArticles.heading#</TITLE>
<description>#lcase(body)#</description>
<LINK>
http://www.halesowen.ac.uk/</link>
<author>#author#</author>
<pubDate>#date#</pubDate>
<item>
</cfoutput>
</cfloop>
<cfoutput> </channel> </rss> </cfoutput></cfsavecontent>
<cfcontent TYPE="text/xml">
<cfoutput>#thexml#</cfoutput>

[Stressed_Simon]

How are you loading the XML into a variable? If that is happening then you must
be reading the file with cffile? To read it as XML you will have to use cfhttp
so that the CF App Server can render the page. Otherwise you are just reading
in your template.

[Mattastic]

Thanks for the reply.

I see what you mean.

I have got it working now so it writes to a seperate xml file.

Is this the best way to do it?

I could set up a scheduled task to write to the file every so often to keep it
up to date?

[Stressed_Simon]

The best way is to do as you suggested and write the xml file with a schedule. This way your data is kept up to date but you don't have to cope with serving dynamic data to aggregators.

[kim.siever@gmail.com]

Make sure the following are on the same line:

<cfoutput>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

like this:

<cfoutput><?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

The XML tag MUST be the first thing in the page, no spaces or line
breaks or anything else before it.

[url]http://blog.hotpepper.ca/archives/2005/11/rss-and-coldfusion/[/url]