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I finally got a live demo up and running! I signed up for a shared hosting account over at discountasp.net so I could post a working version of
the Earthquake Locator application, but ran into a few minor issues related to RIA Services. Thankfully, Tim Heuer had already encountered and explained all of
the problems I had along with solutions to these and other common pitfalls. You can find his blog post here.
The ones that got me were
the default authentication tag being set to Windows instead of Forms, needed to add
the <baseAddressPrefixFilters> tag since I was running on a shared server using host headers, and finally
the Multiple Authentication Schemes settings in
the IIS7 Manager.
To get
the demo application ready, I pulled down local copies of
the earthquake data feeds that
the application can use instead of pulling from
the USGS web site. I basically added
the feed URL as an app setting in
the web.config:
<appSettings>
<!-- USGS Data Feeds: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/ -->
<!--<add key="FeedUrl"
value="http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/1day-M2.5.xml" />-->
<!--<add key="FeedUrl"
value="http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml" />-->
<!--<add key="FeedUrl"
value="~/Demo/1day-M2.5.xml" />-->
<add key="FeedUrl"
value="~/Demo/7day-M2.5.xml" />
</appSettings>
You will need to do
the same if you want to run from local copies of
the feed data. I also made
the following minor changes to
the EarthquakeService class so that it gets
the FeedUrl from
the web.config:
private static readonly string FeedUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["FeedUrl"];
/// <summary>
/// Gets
the feed at
the specified URL.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="url">The URL.</param>
/// <returns>A <see cref="SyndicationFeed"/> object.</returns>
public static SyndicationFeed GetFeed(String url)
{
SyndicationFeed
feed = null;
if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(url) && url.StartsWith("~") )
{
// resolve virtual path to physical file system
url = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(url);
}
try
{
log.Debug("Loading RSS feed: " + url);
using ( var reader = XmlReader.Create(url) )
{
feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);
}
}
catch ( Exception ex )
{
log.Error("Error occurred while loading RSS feed: " + url, ex);
}
return feed;
}
You can now view
the live demo or download
the source code here, but be sure you have WCF RIA Services installed before running
the application locally and make sure
the FeedUrl is pointing to a valid location. Please let me know if you have any comments or if you run into any issues with
the code.
Enjoy!
