eZ publish Enterprise Component: Feed, Design
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
:Author: Derick Rethans
:Revision: $Revision: 814 $
:Date: $Date: 2005-10-28 15:05:18 +0200 (Fri, 28 Oct 2005) $

Design description
==================

The component consists of two major parts. The first part is for generating
Feeds and the second part for parsing feeds. The part that parses feeds
automatically detect which type of feed is being used and will use the
appropriate classes to parse the feed and in case modules are used the feed
elements are passed through a handler that analyses the contents belonging to a
module.

The feed generation part accepts a feed type and a list of modules that should
be included into the generated feed. When adding the data elements to the feed
the component checks whether all required fields are filled in and will try to
use defaults in case different modules can use the same content.

Every feed type does have a default set of properties which always exist
independent of the feed type.

Main classes
------------

ezcFeed
^^^^^^^
This class has methods for both parsing a feed and creating a feed. The class
also implements an iterator so that it is possible to loop over all the items
in a feed. If extra modules are to be used with a feed they can be defined when
creating a feed object.

ezcFeedItem
^^^^^^^^^^^
Contains the information about each Item in the feed. All the normal properties
are accesible here. If a feed contains modules then the properties of those can
be accessed through special properties.



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