Overview

TinyRss is an Android library for working with RSS feeds. It contains a fast parser and customizable ListView output.

Why?

It seems like the standard Java library for RSS/Atom is Rome, which apparently doesn’t work on Android (there’s an incomplete port I guess). Besides Rome, there are plenty of resources online for implementing your own parser. I decided to do just that, but package it as a customizable and reusable library.

Because there’s already a de facto standard implementation for regular Java projects, I decided to focus TinyRss specifically on Android development. Therefore, it’s an Android library project, not a regular jar. It’s integrated tightly with Android API’s and is specifically designed to show an RSS feed in an Android ListView (although you don’t have to use this functionality).

Features

• Fast SAX-based parser for RSS 2.0 feeds
• Object-Oriented model to store feed and item data
• Default ListView implementation for displaying feeds, including:
  • Title
  • Publication Date
  • Description
  • Image
• Asynchronously download and cache item images

Integration

The following instructions are for integrating TinyRss into an existing Android application. They assume you’re using Eclipse with ADT.

1. Clone TinyRss to your machine
2. Import the TinyRssLib project into your Eclipse workspace
3. Add TinyRssLib as a reference in your project’s Properties → Android → Library section
4. Create a new class in your project that extends com.tinymission.rss.FeedActivity
5. Make sure to add your new activity to your manifest file
6. Make sure your manifest file specifies the internet permission: <uses-permission android:name=“android.permission.INTERNET” >
   
7. Go to Properties → Java Build Path → Libraries and click Add JARs…, then select jsoup-1.6.1.jar from the TinyRssLib/lib directory
8. FeedActivity is an abstract class that has one abstract method, getFeedUrl, which you must override to specify the url of the feed to parse:
   

   public class MyActivity extends FeedActivity {
   	@Override
   	public String getFeedUrl() {
   		return “[feed url]”;
   	}
   }

That’s it! You now have a simple activity that will present a ListView with the contents of the specified feed. See the next section for information about customizing the ListView.

Customization

The feed ListView can be customized by overriding methods on the FeedActivity class and by changing the Android resources that are sued to compose the view.

FeedActivity Overrides

The following table shows the methods that can be overridden on a subclass of FeedActivity to control its behavior.

Type	Name	Description	Default
int	getListLayoutId()	The resource id of the layout used as the content view for the activity (must contain a ListView with id @android:id/list)	R.layout.feed
int	getItemLayoutId()	The resource id of the layout used to render each feed item	R.layout.feed_list_item
boolean	isImageVisible()	Whether or not to display an image in each feed item	false
boolean	isDateVisible()	Whether or not to display the item pub date under the title	false
FeedImageSource	getImageSource()	Specifies where to get the image urls from the feed	FeedImageSource.MediaContent
int	getMaxItems()	Specifies the number of items to show in the feed, or a negative value to show all items	-1

Note: Currently, feed images can only be pulled from the media:content or media:thumbnail tags by returning FeedImageSource.MediaContent or FeedImageSource.MediaThumbnail from getImageSource(). Other possible image sources will be added soon.

Resource Overrides

The following table shows the Android resources that be be overridden to control the appearance and layout of the feed ListView.

Name	Description
@layout/feed	The content layout for feed activity (must contain a ListView with id @android:id/list)
@layout/feed_list_item	The layout used to render each feed item
@style/FeedList	Style for the ListView in R.layout.feed
@style/FeedListItem	Style for the default ListView item
@style/FeedItemTitle	Style for the TextView that renders the feed item title
@style/FeedItemDate	Style for the TextView that renders the feed item date
@style/FeedItemDescription	Style for the TextView that renders the feed item description
@style/FeedItemImage	Style for the ImageView that renders the feed item image
@drawable/feed_list_background	The background drawable for @layout/feed_list_item. By default, a vertical linear gradient
@color/feed_bg_top	The top color of the default background gradient for @drawable/feed_list_background
@color/feed_bg_bottom	The bottom color of the default background gradient for @drawable/feed_list_background
@color/feed_text	The default text color for all TextViews in @layout/feed_list_item

License

TinyRss is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license. See LICENSE.