Support Forums

Special Characters in XML title

2010-06-21T20:41:36Z

Andrew - I noticed that if a title in an XML I’m grabbing has special characters in it XMLGrab will pull the entry multiple times and they all have the same date and same time. I’ve seen it grab the same entry 100 times in a row. I know this would be considered malformed XML, but for nobs who’s RSS feed I’m grabing, they wouldn’t know this.

Anyway, the plug-in can work with this problem?

cron job path problem with ee template to call xmlgrab

2010-07-27T15:45:42Z

Hi there,

I’m having trouble setting up a cron job on an ee template that calls the data for xmlgrab.
I’d like the cron job to refresh the page every minute.

Example of command is below.

Min H DM M DW Command
* * * * * /usr/bin/lynx -dump “http://mydomain.co.uk/myTemplates/myScript/”

The problem that i’m having is that the cron job is pointing to the virtualised directory within expression engine.

There isn’t an actual directory on my server called ‘myTemplates’, and as such the cron job cannot find the script with the template ‘myScript’ to run it.

The script within the template ‘myScript’ has to be within EE as it contains EE code.

I’m guessing thia is a pretty common situation and would appreciate some pointers.

Cheers
Peter

Is it possible XMLGrab could make an entry’s status ‘Draft’?

2010-06-16T02:15:26Z

Just wondering whether there could be a situation where XMLGrab would make an entry’s status ‘Draft’ rather than ‘Open’? It’s started happening to a few of my entries and I can’t work out why.

Does EE do this generally under certain circumstances? There’s no expiration date been set on the entries and I can’t see how they look any different to the Open ones, other than the status.

How to handle grabbing changing to items in an XML feed

2009-11-13T01:32:20Z

Hi Andrew

Thanks again for producing these fab addons - I’m using them a lot and finding them invaluable.

Here’s a scenario for you:

I have a property site where the properties that are displayed come from different sources: the owner adds some manually via the EE CP (although hasn’t yet!), and the others are imported via XMLGrab from external xml feeds.

The problem:
If items in the external feeds are updated, they aren’t updated when XMLGrab is re-run, and the data in EE is therefore out of date (think prices etc which are important on a property site).

My workaround:
What I’m doing currently is removing all properties before I run XMLGrab again, like this:

global $DB;

// Remove all entries within Properties weblog
$query = $DB->query("DELETE FROM `exp_weblog_data` WHERE `weblog_id` = 5");
$query = $DB->query("DELETE FROM `exp_weblog_titles` WHERE `weblog_id` = 5"); 

Of course this won’t work when the owner starts adding properties himself. I suspect I’m have a ‘source’ custom field and only delete those where the source equals ‘xml’. Any idea what my SQL would be like to do that?

What do you think?
The site isn’t live yet and I just wanted to pick your brains on whether you think this could be done better. I’ll be wanting users to be able to save certain properties on the site so it’s very important that the urls and reference numbers (not entry_id) stay the same on every import. I think it should work, any thoughts?

Cheers

Jim

unique parameter fails

2010-04-22T16:37:49Z

I’m able to successfully import data but the unique parameter fails. As a result, I am getting duplicate imports. Can you offer any suggestions on how to resolve this?

The feed I’m importing is located here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0bf6a2b92934d571cdf490f777b292ac&_render=rss

It’s based on this pipe I built, which is comprised of 3 separate Yahoo! News feeds, which I know will have content with duplicate titles:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0bf6a2b92934d571cdf490f777b292ac

Because of the known duplicates coming in, I chose to use “title” as the unique parameter (see below):

{exp:xmlgrab url="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0bf6a2b92934d571cdf490f777b292ac&_render=rss" 
 itempath="/rss/channel/item"
 weblog="1" 
 title="title"
 date="pubDate"
 use="link|description"
 fields="source|summary"
 unique="title"}
<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.rareearthmarketnews.com/">Back to the home page &raquo;a> 

Any ideas?

Date and Category Problems

2010-04-07T04:29:44Z

Hi,

Thanks for a great plugin - I am using it to import data from an old EE site into a new one. Everything is working fine except for assigning entries to the correct category automatically and setting the date correctly.
It checks and creates categories just fine but it never assigns the entry to that category. I have solved this by creating a seperate feed for each category on the old system and then importing them into the matching category on the new system.
But where I am stuck now is with the Date. No matter what format I try and use for the date it just imports all entries with the date the import was run.
Here’s an example feed and this is the template I use for it:

{exp:xmlgrab url="http://www.alpentrekking.ch/index.php?feed_swift"
                          itempath="/feed/entry"
                          weblog="3" 
                          title="title"
                          date="published"
                          use="content"
                          fields="news_content"
                          category="13"
                          author="2"
} 

Does the plugin expect the date to be in a certain format?
Thanks for your help.

Debugging

2010-03-04T07:33:19Z

Is there a way to see what input XMLGrab is seeing? I’m trying to get a Last.fm XML feed to work via XMLGrab but it’s not working for some reason. Any ideas?

Here is the feed. I’ve tried every combination of the itempath but it’s just not working.

Any help would be appreciated.

Editing entries via XML

2010-03-05T02:28:08Z

Just wondering if the functionality exists or if it will at some point in the near future to allow the XML feed feeding this plugin to adjust entries based on changes to the XML—such as editing entries/removing entries/closing the status of entries?

My company has a very big and robust directory aggregating lots of data, some of this is output into a publicly accessible XML file. This would be fine if we just needed to dump it into EE to power the web site portion of directory, however this data is changed all the time. People move departments, leave, are disabled, decide to hide their photos, update their bio, cv, etc…

It XMLGrab the right tool for this? If not is their another you are aware of?

Thanks!

Inconsistent Import Behavior

2010-02-23T16:05:39Z

I’m using XMLGrab and FeedGrab as the basis of a new personal life-stream concept website. I’ve made some headway today but there is one feed that is driving me a bit crazy.

The feed is here.

There are two issues that I’m getting the importing behavior:

1) Title
I would like to use “book_edition/title” as the title of my entry. But for some reason, it’s not important. As a test, I created a new custom field and successfully imported the title using the same exact path.

2) Date
I’m guessing that this is because of the way that the date is formatted, but I’m not sure. I’m able to successfully import the “modified” tag into custom fields and the entry title but not the date.

It would be great if you can have a look and see what I could do to fix those items.

Thanks!

Out of memory / possible bug ?

2010-01-24T18:43:42Z

When using XMLGrab or FeedGrab against this feed: http://www.alphenstadfm.nl/rss/rss.xml
my webserver always ran out of memory while checking the unique=guid tag.

As it turns out, this does not happen when checking against any other field, like unique=“title,pubDate”.

Could it be that because the guid field is a URL that this somehow makes the script run out of memory ?