Forum Discussion

guidamedia2's avatar
guidamedia2
Visitor
13 years ago

Custom Channels

I have a channel that accesses our enormous video library, and rather than just promote one channel with access to them all, we are going to publish niche channels that will filter the results based on that channels topic.

Right now I am managing 3 channels, same code, except for the appMain.brs file, where a few variables determine the content the Roku gets, plus the different manifests.

Does anyone have a great solution for being able to only manage one set of code?
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2 Replies

  • RokuChris's avatar
    RokuChris
    Roku Employee
    13 years ago
    Not sure if this will solve your problem, but two things come to mind.

    First, use a software versioning system to manage the code. This is something you should be doing anyway, but it can be especially helpful when you have multiple flavors of the same channel. I prefer svn, but there are plenty of free options out there.

    Secondly, instead of setting up your content variables in code, put them in a config file and read it in at launch. You still have to manage the config file, but that's less risky than making code changes for each variant of the channel.
  • TheEndless's avatar
    TheEndless
    Roku Guru
    13 years ago
    Another option would be to read in the channel information from the manifest at runtime and pass the pertinent information (ex. channel name) to the server when you query for the data. Then you could filter content based on the manifest which you have to change per channel regardless, while using the exact same codebase.