Adapters

Adapters are the heart of toFeed. They take care of retrieving, scraping and generating the syndication feeds for sites you wish to subscribe to.

Adapters can be grouped together in modules. Such a module must contain a ROUTE top-level constant, which is used as the first part of the URL you give your news aggregator to retrieve the content. The complete URL is built by appending the ROUTE class variable of the specific adapter.

For example the built-in adapters include an adapter specific to parsing the Twitter timeline widget data. In the twitter module the ROUTE equals twitter and the adapter’s ROUTE class variable equals timelineWidget. That means this adapter would be reachable at: twitter/timelineWidget.

Notable also is that it’s the primary adapter of this module, meaning instead of having to write twitter/timelineWidget, simply using twitter i.e. the ROUTE of the module itself is sufficient.

When opening a route you can pass in arguments and keyword arguments which the adapters can use to implement certain functionality, for example limiting the title length of feed items. This is simply done via GET parameters. A ?key=value pair would be interpreted as a keyword argument. A key without a value, i.e. ?test& ... would be a simple positional argument. If an adapter needs to accept such parameters you need to define them in the constructor.

It is good practice to accept **kwargs in your adapter’s constructor and forward them to the base adapter’s constructor, this way certain functionality that makes sense for every adapter can be implemented and utilized. Currently this is limited to manually setting the cache timeout, e.g. twitter?cache_timeout=300.

class tofeed.adapters.Adapter(cache_timeout='120')

The base adapter class. Each adapter needs to inherit from this class.

Variables:

• ROUTE (str) – The route leading to the adapter; must be set by the inheriting adapter.
• PRIMARY (bool) – If set to True, the adapter will be recognized as the module’s primary adapter and be directly accessible via the module’s route in addition to its own route. If this is the case, implementing the ROUTE class variable is optional.
• CACHE_TIMEOUT (str) – The default time to cache the content returned by the adapter’s implementation of to_feed().

Note:

Parameters received by the constructor are strings and must be handled accordingly.

Parameters:

cache_timeout (str) – The time to cache the content returned by the adapter’s implementation of to_feed().

to_feed()

Must be implemented by the inheriting adapter.

Return type:str Returns:The generated feed content.