APEX

Hello,

For some time now I have been using APEX to call a database function that generates RSS feeds from database content, using htp.prn.

This works well, and enables RSS feed readers to "subscribe" to a URL such as:-

http://server.company.com:8080/apex/f?p=110:ale_rss:0::NO::p_ale_id,p_list,p_types,p_offset,p_base,p_limit:99,depression,DISEASE,-14,N,100

and have the XML for the RSS feed generated dynamically out of the database.

However we now have a problem in that one of the Feed readers - Newsgator Enterprise Server - has been configured to check for updates every hour. The content of the feed will likely only change once a day, so this means we are having to query the database and output the same XML every hour when that data is not actually changed from one hour to the next.

I understand there is an attribute of an HTTP request header - "last-Modified" - used by many feed readers - which, if I could only get hold of it - I could check first to see if there were any updates available since "last-Modified" (I already store the timestamp of when the data underlying an RSS feed last changed in the database) and avoid very many, potentially costly, database queries.

Anybody any idea how I can get at the HTTP request header attribute - last-Modified from within my APEX app?

Thanks,

Sid.