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How to Migrate to Outbound Feeds from Arc I/O

Outbound Feeds (OBF) replaces Arc XP’s legacy feeds service known as Arc I/O or partner-feeds (arcio). During your migration, the old systems continue to be available, allowing you to create new feeds and perform side-by-side comparisons on both systems to validate your feeds.

After you have validated your new feed, you must modify your robots.txt file or register the new URL with the appropriate system to get those services to find the new /arc/outboundfeeds URLs.

Creating an outbound feed

To create an outbound feed, take the steps in How to configure an outbound feed. Then, compare the new feed to your currently-running feed.

Feed names remain unchanged from arcio (for example, sitemap, rss, and fb-ia), so your new feeds should have the same names, just a different path and parameters. For example:

  • arcio - https://www.example.com/arcio/sitemap/

  • obf - https://www.example.com/arc/outboundfeeds/sitemap/?outputType=xml

This table displays the standard feeds available in both systems. You might not be using all of them, so you need to compare only the feeds you are using.

Arc I/OOutbound Feeds
/arcio/ans//arc/outboundfeeds/ans/?outputType=json
/arcio/fb-ia//arc/outboundfeeds/fb-ia/?outputType=xml
/arcio/flipboard//arc/outboundfeeds/flipboard/?outputType=xml
/arcio/google-news-feed//arc/outboundfeeds/google-news-feed/?outputType=xml
/arcio/msn//arc/outboundfeeds/msn/?outputType=xml
/arcio/rss//arc/outboundfeeds/rss/?outputType=xml
/arcio/sitemap//arc/outboundfeeds/sitemap/?outputType=xml
/arcio/sitemap-index//arc/outboundfeeds/sitemap-index/?outputType=xml
/arcio/news-sitemap//arc/outboundfeeds/news-sitemap/?outputType=xml *
/arcio/sitemap-section/ **/arc/outboundfeeds/sitemap-section/?outputType=xml
/arcio/video-sitemap//arc/outboundfeeds/video-sitemap/?outputType=xml *

* In the documentation, we changed the regexes for news-sitemap and video-sitemap to sitemap-news and sitemap-video, respectively, to make the names more consistent.

** sitemap-section is not a standard feed in arcio.

Validating an outbound feed

The feed blocks provided by Outbound Feeds are configured with the most commonly used defaults. These defaults may not match how your legacy feeds are configured. If you notice a field in your new OBF does not match the value in the legacy feed there are a few options.

For example, the <atom:link> field at the top of the RSS feed has an href that should match the URL requested:

<atom:link href="http://demo-prod.origin.arcpublishing.com/arc/outboundfeeds/rss/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>

Because Outbound Feeds are being hosted at a different URL than the legacy system, this field should not match your old feed.

Another example in the RSS feed is that each article has a <pubDate> field:

 <pubDate>Thu, 12 Nov 2020 14:22:22 +0000</pubDate>

The pubDate field is configurable. If it does not match the old feed, you can change the associated ANS date field in the templates custom fields setup. See the list of custom fields for the RSS feed. Each feed type has its own set of custom fields that you can use to configure your feed.

To add custom functionality to an Outbound Feeds block, you must eject (fork) the Arc Outbound Feeds block code and modify it. If you eject a block, you will not receive updates to that code. To create a custom feed, see Custom block development and outbound feeds

Custom queries

The format of a feed might be correct, but the content between the old and new feeds might not match. There are a couple possible reasons:

  • The two feeds could be using different queries or sort order. You can change the query being using by updating the resolvers Include-Terms and Exclude-Terms fields. See How to create a custom query with Outbound Feeds.
  • Feeds are cached for up to five minutes for performance reasons, so the two systems might reflect the most recently published article five minutes apart.

Custom parameters

For security reasons, Outbound Feeds dropped support for the query and dsl parameters. For a complete list of parameters supported by Outbound Feeds, See Setting up resolvers for Outbound Feeds.

Going live

Depending on the feed, you might need to go to a third party site to update the URL that is requested or update your robots.txt file. For example, to change which URL Facebook requests for your Facebook Instant Articles, you must login to your Facebook admin account and update the URL there. For sitemaps you must update your robots.txt file.

robots.txt file

You can create robots.txt files using the Outbound Feeds Editor, which enables you to manage your robots.txt files and instantly publish them without having to go through Arc XP Customer Support. A sample robots.txt page is included in your Outbound Feeds at the following URL:

/arc/outboundfeeds/robots.txt?outputType=text

Alternatively, you can create your own robots.txt file. See Managing .txt files with Outbound Feeds.

All pages in Outbound Feeds must start with the path /arc/outboundfeeds. You can see your sites current robots.txt by going to your websites /robots.txt:

https://www.example.com/robots.txt

Legacy outbound feeds (partner-feeds)

To access your currently running legacy feeds use the following URLs, replacing the values inside the brackets with your specific values:

  • Sandbox:

    https://{ORG-WEBSITE}-sandbox.web.arc-cdn.net/arcio/{FEED}/

  • Production:

    https://www.example.com/arcio/{FEED}/

Outbound feeds

To access your new Outbound Feeds use the following links, replacing the the values inside the brackets with your specific values.

  • Sandbox:

    https://{ORG-WEBSITE}-sandbox.web.arc-cdn.net/arc/outboundfeeds/{FEED}/?outputType=xml

  • Production:

    https://www.example.com/arc/outboundfeeds/{FEED}/?outputType=xml