Hi All I was wondering if anyone could recommend how to control the layout of an RSS feed when it is pulled in. My RSS feed results in first a list of items and then a detail page. I would like the list to only show the title and description (currently it is showing - title /description/price / number etc etc in the list, meaning it is a little squashed. Is it possible to set this in Buzztouch? Thanks

Hi a_gilbo, You'll want to spend some time playing around with the Advanced Properties for you RSS Feed screen. There are tons of options in there that will affect the display of your feed. I would recommend running your app in the simulator and refreshing it as you make changes in your control panel to see the effect. There is also more information available in the Documentation: http://www.buzztouch.com/docs/v1.5/screen_rss.php

Fantastic - thanks for your help - I'll have a look

Hi Parker I've had a look through the settings however I can't see the option to limit the RSS feed to Title / Description and image only and specify how many feeds are pulled through in the list, i.e 10 rather than 20. Thanks

You can limit what is displayed through that RSS Feeds options at near the bottom. Advanced Story Properties > XML Element Data-Points. Only feed elements set in there will display. You might want to edit the feed itself is too much information is being sent through each element tag. I believe the amount of feeds that display is determined by what sends the feed itself. So you'll have to open up your options for your feed and change it there. Settings for List Row Height, Font Size can also affect the display.

Thanks - yes, I can fiddle around with the sizes ok. I'm not actually able to edit the actual rss feed, I guess what I'm looking for is a way to parse info from rss feeds. For example, once I get to the display feed part the feed displays as a web page rather than just the extracted data. Is there a way to set the layout of an app and determine exactly where the title goes and how it is displayed on the screen - in the same way that interface builder in xcode can influence layout of a page. So for example I want the image to be 30px square top left, the title to the right and the item story displaed as a paragraph below these

What you are asking for isn't something our plugins/screens can handle at this time. Off the top of my head I don't know of any easy to implement solution. As far as I can tell, without owning the RSS feed, you have a whole bunch of custom coding ahead of yourself. You can format a screen in any manner you wish as long as you understand the code to do so. For iOS devices you need to know some Objective-C and for Android devices you'll need some Java. It's possible the already existing screens could give you a jump start on your coding. Have a look at the RSS screen for whichever format you're shooting for and see if you can understand it enough to make some tweaks?. As for parsing the RSS, I imagine because you can view the source code of the feed, that you might be able to create a script to pull out only the needed elements based on their element name?

Go check out Yahoo Pipes at pipes.yahoo.com you can modify/alter merge an RSS feed there and get it to the output you'd like to feed into the RSS reader on your app.

Very cool find, rgtichy!

Fantastic - thanks rgtichy and parker for your help, I'll give that a try. Have a great Xmas!