Personalization

Users

WHUser is the parent entity for all WireHose users. The login "guest" is reserved for the guest user, which is who users are until they login. Guest users are generally created and retrieved automatically; you can override the default guest user creation behavior through a delegate method.

Channels

Channels are defined by the WHChannel interface. Each user may have one or more channels, which represent objects which have been personalized, such as fetchers, polls, stock trackers, etc. WireHose also defines global channels, which belong to all users. WHUser provides several methods for filtering global and user channels.

Channels belong to individual users, and each channel keeps a reference to the factory which created it. Channels are bound to a specific area on the user's page through the areaName property; the default area name is "main."

The order in which channels appear within an area is determined by the channel's importance property; channels with lower importance appear before higher importance.

Subclasses of WHUser can override the allUserChannels method to include channels which are not modeled as part of the base "channels" relationship.

Channel factories

Channel factories, defined by the WHChannelFactory interface, are objects which create channels for users. Typically these are created by an administrator and contain appropriate preset values, and are presented to users in a checkbox list. They are also often used to cache expensive calculations or database fetches. They can also be used to provide default settings for channels that can be overridden on a per-user basis.

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