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Create your own Windows CE Mobile Channel (continued)

USAGE VALUE and SCHEDULE CDF tags
The USAGE VALUE tag says your channel's a "MobileChannel" (be sure to leave out the spaces. Note that this tag ends rather strangely, with just a "/>". Some CDF tags are just strange that way. In any case, here's the USAGE VALUE line:

<USAGE VALUE="MobileChannel"/>

The SCHEDULE tag describes how often you want visitors to get updates from your channel. If your channel will be updated really frequently with, for example, internal news stories about the company or weather alert updates, then you'll want to make this value something like:

<SCHEDULE><INTERVALTIME HOUR="4"/></SCHEDULE>

With my channel, it's good enough to do an update once a day. Here's how my CDF file describes it:

<SCHEDULE><INTERVALTIME DAY="1"/></SCHEDULE>

Special graphics tags
The next three lines describe the special graphics that are shown in dedicated places on your Mobile Channel and in your viewer on your Windows CE mobile device. The LOGO STYLE tag has various options:

  • "The Image-Wide" option refers to the iconwhose dimensions are 194x32 pixels. This icon is displayed really nicely on your PC in the channel bar.

  • The "Image" graphic is 80x24 pixels and is used on the main screen of the Palm-sized PC to describe the channel.

  • The "Icon" image is 16x16 pixels and is displayed in the navigational bar at the top of the Mobile Channels viewer on the Palm-sized PC. This also has an ID tag, which means I can reference the graphic just by using its ID. We'll come onto that a little later in the article.

Here's my code for all three LOGO STYLE tags:

<LOGO STYLE="Image-Wide" HREF="cpchanhead.gif"/>
<LOGO STYLE="Image" HREF="cpheader.gif"/>
<LOGO STYLE="Icon" HREF="cpicon.gif" ID="LOGOIC"/>

Setting up graphics IDs using the ITEM tag
The ITEM tag below is saying a file by the name of CPLOGO.GIF has an ID of LOGO:

<ITEM HREF="cplogo.gif" ID="LOGO"><USAGE VALUE="None"/></ITEM>

This allows me to display the CPLOGO.GIF file by just referencing the ID logo. This is very handy. If I later change my logo graphic, I don't have to change every use of the logo; I only have to change it in the CDF file itself.

A few more specialty tags
CHANSCRIPT is a special command that identifies the ID of the script file that renders the channel and subchannels. In the Microsoft MSDN documentation this is referred to as a MCS (Mobile Channel Script) file. Here's where I differ a bit from Microsoft's recommendations. I'm just using an HTML file to be my main page. The file name is CPINDEX.HTML. I use a CP-INDEX ID to connect the file name with the CHANSCRIPT value.


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