Thanks again for posting this RSS ActionResult, was very helpful.

Here’s a gist with the snippet that might make it make sense: https://gist.github.com/1027181

The issue we were having was that elements were getting HTMLEncoded by default, ruining their entire purpose.

While my solution isn’t quite ideal, this is the technique I use to get around the lack of CDATA support in the .NET SyndicationFeed objects.

public class RssResult : ActionResult {
        public SyndicationFeed Feed { get; set; }

        public RssResult(SyndicationFeed feed) {
            Feed = feed;
        }

        public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) {
            context.HttpContext.Response.ContentType = "application/xml";
            var rssFormatter = new Rss20FeedFormatter(Feed);
            var settings = new XmlWriterSettings {
                                             NewLineHandling = NewLineHandling.None,
                                             Indent = true,
                                             Encoding = Encoding.UTF32,
                                             ConformanceLevel = ConformanceLevel.Document,
                                             OmitXmlDeclaration = true
                                         };

            var buffer = new StringBuilder();
            var cachedOutput = new StringWriter(buffer);

            using (var writer = XmlWriter.Create(cachedOutput, settings)) {
                if (writer != null) {
                    rssFormatter.WriteTo(writer);
                    writer.Close();
                }
            }
            
            var xmlDoc =  XDocument.Parse(buffer.ToString());
            foreach (var element in xmlDoc.Descendants("channel").First().Descendants("item").Descendants("description"))
                VerifyCdataHtmlEncoding(buffer, element);

            foreach (var element in xmlDoc.Descendants("channel").First().Descendants("description"))
                VerifyCdataHtmlEncoding(buffer, element);

            buffer.Replace(" xmlns:a10=\"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom\"", " xmlns:atom=\"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom\"");
            buffer.Replace("a10:", "atom:");

            context.HttpContext.Response.Output.Write(buffer.ToString());
        }

        private static void VerifyCdataHtmlEncoding(StringBuilder buffer, XElement element) {
            if(element.Value.Contains("")) {
                string cdataValue = string.Format("", element.Name, element.Value, element.Name);
                buffer.Replace(element.ToString(), cdataValue);
            }
        }
    }

On a side note, I was very happy to see your code using the “Envy Code R” font, I’ve switched to that recently and haven’t looked back :)

-Jarrod