Catching Errors When Consuming RSS Feeds

Yesterday, Ben Forta blogged about an article by Ben Cortese on Consuming RSS Feeds with ColdFusion.

The article does a great job of providing simple, straightforward code for accessing an RSS feed and displaying it to the user. However, a few more lines of code would shield the user from errors caused by the feed not being available or by the malformed content within the feed.

As the article pointed out, you can retrieve the RSS feed from the remote site through the use of the tag, and then you can convert the XML in the feed to an XML object using the xmlParse function. If you enclose each of these steps within a block, you can intercept the errors and give your user a simple error message that explains there`s a problem with the feed.

For example, say you wanted to consume the main news feed from Digg.com (http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml). Here`s how you would retrieve the feed and then convert it to an XML object with error-handling:

It`s a good idea to include this kind of error-handling whenever your application relies on external data in order to function properly so that the user knows that the problem lies with the source of the data rather than the application itself. And in the case of RSS feeds, the problem with the feed could be resolved within the next few minutes or so: the server providing the feed could come back up, or the problem entry in the feed could be removed (this is especially true of Web 2.0 user-driven sites where the feed content is updated frequently).