Recipes: Possible to show a feed description?

[Starson17]

I'm working on a recipe that will potentially have 150 "feeds," with a subset to be selected by the user. I've put "feeds' into quotes because they are not true RSS feeds. I know the feed URL, and I can calculate the article URL from the feed URL without needing to fetch anything. As a result, I'm using the parse_index method, which returns a feed title and a corresponding list of articles for each feed. I simply generate everything manually and return the generated results.
Each article for each feed gets a title, URL, date and description.

My question: Is it possible to supply (and display) descriptions for the feeds, not just the articles within each feed?

Thanks for any comments.

[kovidgoyal]

Not when you use parse_index, making a patch to do that should be easy though

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Not when you use parse_index, making a patch to do that should be easy though

Before patching, is there another method I might try instead of parse_index?

Related question: Looking at other recipes, it appears that feed descriptions appear on the top of the same page that the article links and article descriptions are on. I would have thought that a feed description would logically go on the previous page, i.e., on the page of links for the feeds, not on the page you see after you've selected a feed. Do any methods allow a feed description to appear with its link, so the user can read the description before selecting the feed?

[kovidgoyal]

No parse_index is it. You'll have to basically have parse_index optionally return a list of 3-tuple instead of 2-tuples where the third element is the description and change the code in feeds.__init__ to optionally handle 3-tuples

Should also be a relatively easy change to add descriptions to the page listing feeds as well as the feed page itself (the reason it's done the way it is is that mostly I envisage people using the metadata tanle of contents, where you can't really have a description)

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

No parse_index is it. You'll have to basically have parse_index optionally return a list of 3-tuple instead of 2-tuples where the third element is the description and change the code in feeds.__init__ to optionally handle 3-tuples

Should also be a relatively easy change to add descriptions to the page listing feeds as well as the feed page itself (the reason it's done the way it is is that mostly I envisage people using the metadata tanle of contents, where you can't really have a description)

Thanks for the comments. I've looked over feeds.__init__ and parse_index. As you say, it doesn't look too hard to patch to allow an optional 3 tuple to bring in a feed description with parse_index. OTOH, I was just writing this recipe for others to use, so I'd have to patch, then get it accepted, then have a user upgrade before they could use the recipe. Plus, the docs would need updating for anyone else to use the 3 tuple format in a recipe.

I've already got a working version using the 2-tuple format, with the feed descriptions just added as comments in the recipe. It's usable now.

Do you think writing a patch would be worthwhile? If so, I'll add a bug track and put it on my todo. Up to this point, each patch I've written has been something that I needed personally, so it didn't matter if it was added to the main branch.

BTW, while looking over the code, I spotted what looks like a typo in line 125 of src\calibre\web\feeds\__init__.py/125 in
populate_from_preparsed_feed

self.descrition = ''

Looks like a missing "p" I'd post a bug, but I didn't have time to track down the effect, so maybe it's not one.

[kovidgoyal]

I don't really care about this, so unless you do, don't bother.

descrition is a bug. Doesn't have any effect though.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I don't really care about this, so unless you do, don't bother.

Thanks. I may do it at some point when I have more time, but it's not very high priority. At best, it would make some recipes a bit nicer to have a description of the feeds, but it's nothing earth-shattering.