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Generating Atom Feed from SQL Data

  • Mar 31, 2008
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 has extensive support for XML document generation. In this article, Ivan Pepelnjak describes how you can use it to produce an Atom feed directly on the SQL Server with the Transact SQL commands.
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Atom technology (not the one discussed by nuclear physicists) was created in 2003 to address the shortcomings of the then-prevalent RDF Site Summary (RSS; also known as Really Simple Syndication) family of incompatible formats. It gained widespread adoption when Google decided to use it as the Application Program Interface (API) to a variety of its services including Blogger, Gmail, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Google Maps. The Atom format is becoming a generic protocol facilitating data exchange between web services and applications. For example, the Google Maps support the display of locations encoded within an Atom feed with the GeoRSS elements.

In this article, you'll see how you can create an Atom feed from data in your SQL database. We'll use a simple product description table containing product identifiers, names, and descriptions:

CREATE TABLE Products (
 PartNo   nvarchar(20) NOT NULL,
 ProductName nvarchar(200) NOT NULL,
 ProductDescription nvarchar(max) NOT NULL,
 CONSTRAINT PK_Products PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (PartNo ASC)
)

You could place this feed directly onto your web site to allow your visitors to subscribe to new product information.

NOTE

You can download the sample SQL Server database from my web site.

Anatomy of an Atom Feed

An Atom feed has pretty simple structure well documented in RFC 4287. I would highly recommend that you read the RFC if you want to know the in-depth details of the Atom format. I'll just give you the basic information you need to build your first feed:

  • Atom is an XML-based document format with XML namespace http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom.
  • The root element of the Atom document is the feed element that contains a few feed-describing children and a number of entry elements describing individual items within the feed.
  • The feed and the entry elements contain a number of child elements that describe them. The mandatory ones are id (uniquely identifying the feed or the element), title (name of the feed or the title of the entry), author, and updated elements.
  • The feed element could contain category descriptions, icon pointers, logo, rights information (for example, copyright text), as well as any extension element.
  • The entry element must contain a content, summary, or link child element. It could also contain list of categories, links to alternate representations of the entry (for example, HTML page), list of contributors, and a published date/time.

The feed and entry id is an Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI). It could be a URL that displays the feed or the entry, or you could use any other registered URI scheme—for example, the Uniform Resource Names syntax to use Universally Unique Identifiers.

NOTE

The URL/URI/IRI acronym soup is a bit of a mess. Every Universal Resource Locator (URL; read: web address) is also a Universal Resource Identifier (URI), while not all URIs are locators. Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is an URI which can use non-ASCII Unicode characters.

In our examples, we'll extend the database structure with a new uniqueidentifier column to provide universally unique identifiers for our products:

ALTER TABLE Products ADD UniqueID uniqueidentifier 
 NOT NULL DEFAULT NEWID()

The Atom standard also requires a timestamp for the feed as well as for each entry element to give the readers the capability to reliably identify changes in the feed content. The timestamps have to conform to the ISO 8601 date/time format (also specified in RFC 3339). To enable the timestamps in the Atom feed, we'll add a Modified field to the Products table. Its default value will be current date/time:

ALTER TABLE Products ADD Modified Datetime 
 NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE()

Furthermore, we should update the Modified field each time the product data is updated to ensure that the Atom readers will fetch the updated contents. The easiest way to do it is with an UPDATE trigger:

CREATE TRIGGER UpdateProducts ON Products AFTER UPDATE
 AS BEGIN
  UPDATE Products SET Modified = GETDATE()
   WHERE PartNo IN (SELECT PartNo FROM Inserted)
 END

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