Board Meeting - Feeds

Steve: Now, just tell me what all can be done using the XML connector framework. I remember you mentioning the term "feed". What exactly is this?

Timothy: Well, in one sentence - using the XML connector framework, you can crawl data by exporting the documents that needs to be crawled as feeds. Feeds are nothing but, XML documents. The XML connector requires that the contents of a repository be exposed as XML documents known as Control feed and Directory feed.

Now, coming to the term "feed" in detail. Every document in a repository is referred to as an item in XML connector. An aggregate of a set of items is known as a channel or feed. When a repository is to be crawled, a XML document has to be generated for each feed. This document contains information about the feed and the items in the feed. Each feed is associated with information such as feed name, type of the feed, no. of items, and so on. Each item contains information about the document such as author, access URL, last modified date, security information, status, contents, and so on.