One important thing to keep in mind is that the author element is only
required in an entry if it does not exist at the feed level, so you
really do not need to worry about entry level authors.
This is just off the top of my head, so this might not entirely work,
but if I were building an Atom feed from a directory listing, I'd likely
do something like the following:
<feed xmlns="...">
<id>file:/path/to/the/folder</id> <!-- or whatever else works -->
<title>folder name</title>
<updated>{folder last modified timestamp}</updated>
<link rel="self" href="..." />
<link rel="alternate" href="..." />
<author><name /></author> <!-- the name can be empty-->
<entry>
<id>file:/path/to/the/file</id>
<title>filename</title>
<updated>{file last modified timestamp}</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="..." href="file:/path/to/the/file" />
<summary>filename, type, last modified, size, etc. Info that would
typically appear in a directory listing</summary>
</entry>
</feed>
It really shouldn't need to get anymore complicated than that.
- James
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi All-
>
> Forgive me if this has been gone over before, but my searches have not
> turned up anything useful.
>
> I find myself wanting to use Atom as a messaging protocol within an
> application, especially in the cases when those 'messages' might be used
> in cases other than the the one it was designed for. I often get stuck,
> though, trying to determine the most correct way to form the feed, esp.
> when it comes to elements such as 'author', 'category' (is that as wide
> open as it seems?), title, updated, etc.
>
> In one particular case, I would like to auto-generate an Atom document
> to sit in a web-accessible directory of files, enabling another
> application to 'discover' those files and decide whether to grab them.
> The particular use case is a University setting in which we have a
> centralized digital asset management & sharing tool, but users have no
> good way to get their stuff in there (web-based upload forms are only
> good for a few items). Users DO have online, web-accessible space that
> they can deposit items to by way of a WebDAV interface that most folks
> are comfortable with. I would like to be able to have them deposit
> items in a specially-named directory there, have the system generate an
> atom document to go with it, then have the asset management tool ingest
> those items. A simple interface to the Atom-creator would even allow
> the user to add a bit of their own metadata before the ingest occurs.
>
> I suspect I would use a mapping like:
>
> entry (file):
> author = file owner
> id = host/filepath
> title = filename
> updated = last modified time
>
> feed (directory):
> title = directory name
> updated = most recently updated file
>
> Any thoughts on this or implementations I could 'borrow' (perl, php,
> python, ruby ...)
>
> thanks!
> Peter Keane
>
>
