RSS & Podcast Feed Action
Last updated
Last updated
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.
The action uses the following settings:
Setting | Description | |
Feeds | The URLs of the feeds you want to retrieve. One feed URL for each line | |
Track Read Items | If enabled, Connect 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 |
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:
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:
This way of declaring feed sources will force Connect 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, Connect 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.
Unread Entries. This action will trigger any child operation when new unread entries are found.
This action produces the following variables:
Variable | Description |
rss_model | The Connect 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 |
Channel specific availability follows the table below:
Channel | Availability |
Fully Available. | |
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
