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III Featured Lists from the XMLopac

Featured lists are another thing I’d like to use more of. The ability to pull the latest books and other data from the server would be nice. While I figured out how to pull the information, the XML server appears to ignore my limiting and returns the whole list no matter what. This can be problematic if you have a large featured list. The way to get a featured list from the xmlopac is just take the list number and add a zero in front. Here’s an example. He’s the same example in a slightly nicer display (parsed). These links may break if the lists are removed. I figured out the list number by going to /ftlists in the opac, clicking on a list and then taking the numbers directly after the letters bib.

I’m hoping to make this a bit more useful with the item data but we’ll see if I can figure out how to limit/paginate it first.

I was messing with some of the XMLopac stuff earlier. I’ve got some fairly basic xslt files to transform the lists to RSS/Atom feeds:

http://blog.lib.msu.edu/gerrishj/xmlopac/

Here’s an example using it:
http://blog.lib.msu.edu/gerrishj/xmlopac/feeds.php?q=11
(generates a list of different feeds)

Yeah I created RSS/Atom for searches, lists and a few other things. I need to move their location and I’ll probably post more later.

[...] In addition, Ryan has written up a couple great how-to’s on getting item data and featured lists from the XML. I, for one, had no idea it was possible to grab featured lists this way. Ryan Eby has been documenting III’s XMLOPAC for quite some time now and he’s certainly one of only a handful of authoritative voices on the feature. [...]