Creating Dynamic Media

Introduction

The Appspace content library supports the usage of Dynamic Media, allowing designers to specify content that is located externally on a network, and set a frequency to retrieve new versions of the content. Its main purpose is to display content that changes frequently without manual uploading, such as traffic camera images, weather updates and server generated graphs.

This guide will illustrate the steps to configure and use dynamic media content with Appspace.

Refresh Frequency

Appspace background agents work automatically to download the specified content at a user-configurable interval (default value is 15 minutes) and will then proceed to update an applications’ media zone playlist.

Important

The default value of 15 minutes stated above is also the fixed minimum value pre-configured by Appspace for the updating of dynamic media content. This is to avoid overloading an Appspace server with constant content update requests and caching as the number of dynamic media content items grow over time in an Appspace library.

Supported Formats

  • Image – PNG, JPG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TIFF, ICO
  • Flash – SWF
  • Video – FLV, WMV, AVI, MPG, MPEG, ASF, TS, OGV

Creating Dynamic Media

Important

All dynamic media content items must be added to the Content Library prior to being used in any application.

Step 1

From the Content Library, select your folder you wish to add dynamic media to. Click the + button to add a new item and select Add Dynamic Media.


Step 2

Fill in the title and description of the content. You can also choose to tag your content to help you search for it later.


Step 3

Under the Edit tab, select the appropriate protocol (http or https). Enter the URL of the dynamic content in the Address section. Key in the appropriate integer in the Update Frequency section (default/minimum value is 15 minutes). Click APPLY when finished.


Note

If the URL entered requires authentication for accessing the content, check the box next to Use Network Credentials and enter the Username and Password accordingly.