RSS & Podcast Feed Action

This action can be used to check one or more online RSS feeds. Using a smart check approach, this operation will trigger only as new items are found: if the feed is not changing, this operation will not trigger.

Settings

The action uses the following settings:

Setting	Description	Parsed
Feeds	The URLs of the feeds you want to retrieve. One feed URL for each line	✅
Track Read Items	If enabled, Xenioo will automatically keep track of items already parsed and displayed for every conversation so that only unread feed items are presented to the user.	⛔
Feed Data Mode	This option will change how the action retrieves and displays the data to the user	⛔
Max Items	The maximum number of items that will be returned by this action	✅
Item Button Text	The text of the carousel will automatically display to redirect the user to the actual feed content	✅

Remarks

This action is capable of downloading and parsing multiple standard feeds containing both blog or news entries or media podcasts.

When using multiple feed sources and Single Feed Variables mode, only the first unread item will be returned. When using Dynamic Carousel mode or Data Model mode all feeds will be evaluated until Max Items value is reached.

Unread items tracking is done by using the feed url source as a key. For this reason, multiple feeds sharing the same news may still be displaying the same results. As an example, let's look at the following feed sources:

https://www.mynewssite.com/feed?tag=FINANCE
https://www.mynewssite.com/feed?tag=POLITICS

The above sources are both from the same site, filtering news by tag. A news entry may very well have both, talking about POLITICS and FINANCE and the user may end up seeing the news two times. To prevent this you can use feed categorization to group each feed into a specific category like below:

NEWS > https://www.mynewssite.com/feed?tag=FINANCE
NEWS > https://www.mynewssite.com/feed?tag=POLITICS

This way of declaring feed sources will force Xenioo to use NEWS as key instead of each feed URL. As a result, shared items will be always tracked as read.

When using Data Model mode, Xenioo will just retrieve any new feed item and return a variable named rss_model containing the full model of the items retrieved. This model, of which you find an example below, can be manipulated using cloud scripting or inline parsing.

[
    {
        "index" : 0,
        "title" : "the feed global title",
        "subtitle" : "the feed item title",
        "text" : "the description of the item, max 125 chars",
        "fullbody" : "the full description of the item",
        "url" : "the url of the item",
        "image_url" : "the image of the item, if any",
        "audio_url" : "the audio url of the item, if any"
    },
    {
        "index" : 1,
        [...]
    },
]

Trigger

Unread Entries. This action will trigger any child operation when new unread entries are found.

Variables

This action produces the following variables:

Variable	Description
rss_model	The Xenioo feed model containing all of the feed items found
rss_feed_title	The global title of the feed
rss_feed_home_url	The global url of the feed. Usually the homepage of the hosting site.
rss_item_title	The title of the single feed entry
rss_item_description	The description of the single feed entry
rss_item_url	The url of the single feed entry
rss_item_image	The image of the single feed entry, if any.
rss_item_audio_url	The audio source of the single podcast feed entry
rss_found	True if any feed item has been found, otherwise false
rss_feed_new_item_found	The number of feed items found

Availability

Channel specific availability follows the table below:

Channel	Availability
Facebook	Fully Available.
WhatsApp	Configuration Dependant.
Telegram	Fully Available.
Web	Fully Available.
Alexa	Configuration Dependant.
Google Assistant	Configuration Dependant.
Slack	Fully Available.
API	Fully Available.

This action can be used only inside interactions and not as child of other actions. This action requires a Premium Account to be used on a live chatbot.

Further Reading

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