Each Channel object can run an agent to update its content during a refresh cycle. The programmer can specify the agent to use with the Channel object RefreshType property. To facilitate the passing of options to the agent at refresh runtime, the Channel object also has the RefreshOptions collection, which is a class Dictionary object. Each key in the Dictionary contains the name of an option, and the associated value contains the option value or values.
When the refresh cycle is run on a Channel object, it creates an ActiveX Scripting Host to execute the agent. For the purposes of this reference, this host will be referred to as the Active Channel Server Agent Host, or just Channel Agent Host. The script used to add the new content will be referred to as the Channel Agent.