ITEM Element

---

Defines an item in a channel.

Syntax

<ITEM
    HREF="url"
    LASTMOD="date"
    LEVEL="n"
    PRECACHE="YES" | "NO" 
>

Attributes

HREF

Required. URL that represents the ITEM. The browser navigates to this location when the user activates the channel. There must be exactly one HREF attribute with the ITEM element. To enable page-hit logging, the URL must contain no more than 255 characters. The HREF attribute should be omitted if the ITEM element contains an anchor (A) as a child element.

LASTMOD

Last date/time in GMT that the page indexed by the HREF attribute was modified. GMT is Greenwich Mean Time, also known as Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). Note that the LASTMOD date/time is not necessarily your local time. This allows the channel client to determine whether the content has changed since the last time it was downloaded. The ITEM is downloaded only if the date associated with the cached ITEM is older than the LASTMOD value in the CDF file. Additional information on optimizing channels is available in the Creating Active Channels documentation. The date format used in the LASTMOD attribute is specified in the form yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm, where:

yyyy	Specifies the year.
mm	Specifies the month (01-12).
dd	Specifies the day of the month (01-31).
hh	Specifies the hour of the day (00-23).
mm	Specifies the minutes (00-59).

LEVEL

Number of levels (or links) deep the client should "site crawl" and precache the HTML content from the URL specified in the HREF attribute. The default is zero, which specifies to precache only the URL of the ITEM and the images it references. If the URL contains frames, the client also retrieves all content inside the frames.

PRECACHE

String value that specifies whether content should be downloaded and cached on the client computer. If PRECACHE is omitted or set to YES, content is downloaded only if the user has specified that channel content should be downloaded. If PRECACHE is set to NO, content is not downloaded and the LEVEL attribute is ignored.

Element Information

Number of occurrences	Any number
Parent elements	CHANNEL
Child elements	A, ABSTRACT, CHANNEL, LOG, LOGO, TITLE, USAGE
File formats supported	CDF
Requires closing tag	Yes

Remarks

An ITEM is a unit of information that usually corresponds to a Web page. In an Active Channel, ITEMs will appear in the hierarchy exposed in the Channels Explorer Bar. To prevent an ITEM from showing up in the Channels Explorer Bar, the USAGE element should be included as a child element of the ITEM with the VALUE attribute set to "none".

ITEMs are not cached until the synchronization cycle after the user subscribes to the CHANNEL.

Example

The following example defines an ITEM page within a CDF CHANNEL. Omission of the LEVEL attribute accepts the default value of 0.

<ITEM HREF="http://www.joyware.tld/promo.htm"
      LASTMOD="1998-08-17T10:30"
      PRECACHE="YES">
    <TITLE>Welcome to JoyWare!</TITLE>
    <ABSTRACT>JoyWare articles, news, and promotional offers</ABSTRACT>
    <LOGO HREF="http://www.joyware.tld/promoicon.gif" STYLE="ICON" />
    <LOGO HREF="http://www.joyware.tld/promoimage.gif" STYLE="IMAGE" />
</ITEM>