Django: RSS and ATOM feeds Content-Type header?

Question

I followed along this tutorial for django's RSS and ATOM feeds and I got it to work.

However the test development server keeps making the browser download the feeds as a file instead of the browser detecting it as an xml document.

My experience with HTTP tells me that there is a missing mime type in the Content-Type header.

How do I specify that in django?

Answer 1

There is a comment in the Everyblock source code about this.

They define a class that replaces the mime type of the standard Django feed like so:

# RSS feeds powered by Django's syndication framework use MIME type
# 'application/rss+xml'. That's unacceptable to us, because that MIME type
# prompts users to download the feed in some browsers, which is confusing.
# Here, we set the MIME type so that it doesn't do that prompt.
class CorrectMimeTypeFeed(Rss201rev2Feed):
    mime_type = 'application/xml'

# This is a django.contrib.syndication.feeds.Feed subclass whose feed_type
# is set to our preferred MIME type.
class EbpubFeed(Feed):
    feed_type = CorrectMimeTypeFeed

Answer 2

Are you using the available view for rss? This is what I have in my urls.py - and I am not setting anything about mimetypes:

urlpatterns += patterns('',
    (r'^feeds/(?P<url>.*)/$', 'django.contrib.syndication.views.feed', {'feed_dict': published_feeds}, 'view_name')`,
)

where published_feeds is something like

class LatestNewsFeed(Feed):
    def get_object(self, bits):
      pass

    def title(self, obj):
      return "Feed title"

    def link(self, obj):
      if not obj:
        return FeedDoesNotExist
      return slugify(obj[0])

    def description(self, obj):
      return "Feed description"

    def items(self, obj):
      return obj[1]

published_feeds = {'mlist': LatestNewsFeed}

Answer 3

When you create an HTTPReponse object you can specify its content-type:

HttpResponse(content_type='application/xml')

Or whatever the content type actually is.

See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/request-response/#django.http.HttpResponse.__init__

Answer 4

I guess the problem was with the Camino browser on OS X, not with the HTTP header and mime type.

When I tried on Safari, it worked.

Answer 5

I still encountered this problem, 9 years later with Firefox and Django 2.1.

The solutions above didn't cut it, so I ended up using this:

class XMLFeed(Feed):
    def get_feed(self, obj, request):
        feedgen = super().get_feed(obj, request)
        feedgen.content_type = 'application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8'  # New standard
        # feedgen.content_type = 'application/xml; charset=utf-8'  # Old standard, left here for reference
        return feedgen

Using this class instead of Feed sets the mime-type to 'application/rss+xml' as wanted.

Update

It was brought to my attention that mime-type 'application/xml' is outdated, and 'application/rss+xml' should be used instead. The code above was updated accordingly but has yet to be tested.