Getting data from another site (RSS Feed ?)

Hi
I have a site that requires daily data input into its MS SQL Data Base. Presently this is done manually by going to various 2nd party sites, writing the data down, and then imputing the data into my sites data base. This was doable when the site was small but now I would like to make it automatic.

Is a RSS feed what I need to implement or is there some other way to get the data. All the data I need is displayed on other 2nd party web sites.

Thanks for your assistance.
albanello

 

If the data is just displayed on the other sites, you probably have a more complicated problem of parsing those pages for the information you need.

What you probably WANT is for THOSE sites to provide an RSS feed with their data. Then you can schedule a task to read that RSS feed each day, do something with it and store it in your database.

Do these 3rd party sites provide RSS feeds or any other sort of organized feed of their data?

 

If the data you are transfering isn't in the "blog" format, RSS wont work for you. You can use a similar implementation and create return an xml dataset. You could probably create a webservice to do this pretty easily, you could modify it to accept arguments as well like primary key, user/pass, etc.



Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

Thanks for your responce


There are web sites that have RSS Feeds. I have no idea what blog format is. It appears the RSS Feed produces a XML document. Is the sequence toread in the XML page and parse that for the data I need ?


Is there a site that explains how to get this RSS Feed data. I am working with ASP.NET VB.NET and MS SQL.





Thanks


albanello