320967 - 'content:encoded' field ignored in RSS2 feed parsing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[dwsharp]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7 (CK-IBM)
Build Identifier: Thunderbird nightly build version 1.5 (20051219) from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-mozilla1.8/

When I upgraded from Thunderbird 1.0.7 to Thunderbird 1.5, an RSS 2.0 feed I monitored changed from showing the full content of the article to only showing the description.  It appears that in content/messenger-newsblog/feed-parser.js (in chrome/newsblog.jar), the function parseAsRSS2() contains only the line

var content = getNodeValue(itemNode.getElementsByTagNameNS(RSS_CONTENT_NS, "encoded")[0]);

which puts the 'content:encoded' text into a local variable, but does nothing else with it -- specifically, it doesn't add the data to the item.content variable.  The corresponding code from feed.js in Thunderbird 1.0.7 has

var content = getNodeValue(itemNode.getElementsByTagNameNS(RSS_CONTENT_NS, "encoded")[0]);
if (content)
   item.content = converter.ConvertFromUnicode(content);

so it appears that either the last two lines were lost somewhere along the line, or the first line was not updated to use 'item.content' instead of 'var content'.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Subscribe to an RSS 2.0 feed, setting the 'Show the article summary instead of loading the web page' option.
2. Fetch the feed.
3. View a message from the feed.
4. View the original XML RSS feed file.

Actual Results:  
The body of the message you view will contain only the 'description' data from the RSS feed, not the 'contents:encoded' data.

Expected Results:  
The 'contents:encoded' data from the feed should be displayed.  Even if the 'Show the article summary instead of loading the web page' option is set, displaying the 'description' is overridden by displaying the 'contents:encoded' if it is available.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Confirmed on Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051213 Thunderbird/1.5 ID:2005121307

Seems like fallout from bug 272812. I'll attach a patch for this.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: proposed fix (for trunk)

This adds back setting item.content which was removed by mistake earlier, I assume. Also removes a converter that isn't used for anything.

Comment 3

[Justin Kerk]

Is there any way this can get on the branch radar? This affects the 1.5 RC builds too and is a big regression. For example, http://www.imhostfu.com/index.php?/feeds/index.rss2 now only displays the article titles and none of the content, and many other blogs I subscribe to are now showing short, unformatted snippets instead of the full articles. It's making Thunderbird almost useless as an RSS reader.

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

once it's been tested on the trunk it will be a good candidate for 1.5.0.1 (only effects tbird) and 2.0.

Comment 5

[Scott MacGregor]

fixed on the trunk. leaving open so I don't forget this for 1.8.1 branch once checkin.

thanks for the patch mkmelin and happy new year.

Comment 6

[Scott MacGregor]

fixed on the trunk.

leaving open for landing this fix for 1.5.1

Comment 7

[Robert Sayre]

*** Bug 299502 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Scott MacGregor]

1.8.0.2 is technically the first release with this Thunderbird fix.