RDP News in HTML format

mary.villa

we are no longer receiving stories in HTML format. We use the following code for retrieving a story:

try

{

Stopwatch timer = new Stopwatch();

logger.Debug($"Retrieving story id {storyId}");

timer.Start();

var storyDef = Story.Definition(requestStoryId);

if (isHtml)

storyDef = storyDef.HtmlFormat(true);

storiesAPIRequests.Mark();

var story = await storyDef.GetDataAsync();

timer.Stop();

if (story != null && story.IsSuccess)

{

logger.Debug($"Retrieved story for {storyId} in {timer.Elapsed}");

newsStory = new NewsStory

{

StoryId = requestStoryId,

Story = story.Data.NewsStory,

ContentType = story.Data.ContentType,

Retrieved = DateTime.Now

};

}

else

{

string error = story != null ? story.HttpStatus.ToString() : "Unknown";

logger.Error($"Unable to retrieve story {storyId} due to {error}");

}

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

logger.Error($"Failed to retrieve story for {storyId} because of {ex.Message}");

}

The key call here is storyDef.HtmlFormat(true) which should tell the Refinitiv Data Library to return the story in HTML. The HTML would use styles such as scs_html_header which are in the documentation and which allowed us to format the story appropriately. This was working fine in the past, but now no longer does and simply returns the story in text format, which completely destroys the formatting of a story and makes it almost unreadable.

client screenshot rdp news.png

Is there a reason why this is no longer working?

nick.zincone

Hi @mary.villa

It appears the News Story service has change it's interface. Apparently, the response has changed and now automatically delivers both text-based and html-based data. As a result, the service ignores the HTML specifier. I'm surprised the service did not update the version of the endpoint to protect against change - this is why endpoints have versions so you don't break existing applications.

That being said, the next version of the .Net Library will remove the Html specification and include properties that can extract both text and html content.

In the meantime, you can process the Raw data to pull out the HTML content. For example:

var story = Story.Definition("<story ID>").get_data();

...

var html = story.Data.Raw.SelectToken("newsItem.contentSet.inlineXML[0].$")?.ToString();