From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2004-11-13T00:14:19+09:00
Subject: why does rss/maker not raise errors?

There are lots of mandatory attributes (yes, which are mandatory is
documented on the wiki), but what is mandatory is different for
different RSS versions, and there are no errors raised, #make just
returns 'nil'. This caused me some trouble.

I hacked an extra line into this:

  make/0.9.rb:22
    if rss.channel
      rss
    else
+     raise "required channel or image properties are missing!"
      nil
    end

This isn't a real solution - it doesn't say what property is missing,
and only is in the 0.9 code, somebody who knew the code could do this
much better!

Also, what is "image"? I don't know what to put there, so I just put
some strings, and my RSS reader ignores them.


After I figured out the mandatory, it worked very well, thank you!

Sam


--- example ---
#!/opt/local/bin/ruby -w

require 'rss/maker'

#
# Remove ANY one of the property setting lines, and #make will return nil
# (without my example patch).
#

rss = RSS::Maker.make("0.9") do |maker|
  maker.channel.title = "title"
  maker.channel.link = "link"
  maker.channel.description = "description"
  maker.channel.language = "language"

  maker.image.url = "maker.image.url"
  maker.image.title = "maker.image.title"

  item = maker.items.new_item
  item.title = "item title"
  item.link =  "link"
end

puts rss.to_s