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Add Feed Discovery Links Easily

Submitted by Peter Harkins on Thu, 2007-05-03 21:20.

I'm working on discussion forums for NearbyGamers and I'm building the first feeds into the site. I worked up a clean way to add them from my controllers similar to my tidy stylesheets code. Here's how to do it.

In the <head> of your app/views/layouts/application.rhtml call the auto_discovery_link_tag to print the tags:

  <%- @feeds.each do |feed| -%>
    <%= auto_discovery_link_tag(:atom, *feed) %>
  <%- end -%>

In app/controllers/application.rb:

  def initialize
    @feeds = []
  end

  def add_feed title, options={}
    @feeds << [ { 
      :controller => self.controller_name, 
      :action => self.action_name, 
      :format => 'atom' 
    }.update(options), { :title => title } ] 
  end

And you're all set up. Where you want an action to present feeds, call add_feed. After title, it takes options for url construction.

  add_feed 'New discussions'
  add_feed 'New posts', :action => 'posts', :sort_by => 'new'

It defaults to the current action with a format of 'atom' so you can add feed code to your respond_to block. I'll post again soon with code integrate resource_feeder to do this.