ITEM element

Obsolete. Defines an item in a channel.

Usage

<ITEM
  HREF = "url"
  LASTMOD = "date"
  LEVEL = "n"
  PRECACHE = "sCache">
  child elements
</ITEM>

Attributes

Attribute Type Required Description

HREF

url

Yes

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.

Note  CDF supports only HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. If a different protocol is used, Internet Explorer will fail to navigate to the page without notifying the user.
 

LASTMOD

date

No

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

n

No

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

sCache

No

String that specifies whether content is donwloaded.

No

Content is not downloaded and the LEVEL attribute is ignored.

Yes

Default. Content is downloaded only if the user has specified that channel content should be downloaded.

Child elements

Element

A

ABSTRACT

CHANNEL

LOG

LOGO

TITLE

USAGE

Child element sequence

AABSTRACTCHANNELLOGLOGOTITLEUSAGE

Parent elements

Element

CHANNEL

Remarks

Windows Internet Explorer 7. The CDF (Channel Definition Format) is obsolete and should not be used.

An ITEM is a unit of information that usually corresponds to a Web page. In a Microsoft 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 USAGE attribute set to NONE.

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

Examples

The following example defines an ITEM page within a CDF CHANNEL. Omission of the ITEM 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>

Element information

Minimum supported system

Windows XP
Can be empty No