Handler - HeadlinesOnly

 

Description

The HeadlinesOnly juggler passes through a product with everything but the headline stripped off. Optionally, the user may choose to leave descriptions up to a maximum length and/or leave the content if it is a URL.

 

Configuration Variables

maxDescriptionLength
Defaults to zero which means no descriptions will be left on products. May be changed to indicate the maximum number of characters a description may have in order to be left on the product for the user to see. Note that descriptions longer than the specified length are not truncated, but are omitted altogether. This is because during testing we found that the first N characters of a long description generally were not of much use, and since the goal of this juggler is to selectively minimize the amount of information being propagated, it seemed prudent to omit verbose descriptions rather than partially include them.

keepURL

Defaults to false which means no URL contents will be left on products. May be changed to true if the user wishes to have content types which are URLs left on the products.

Product

Product is null if there are no sources or if the sources don't contribute product.

The final product is a condensed version of the original product as described below.

 

How it works

The HeadlinesOnly juggler extends the passThru juggler by calling upon it to create a composite product, and then filtering this composite product to obtain a condensed version. The filtered product is built by stripping off each product's description and content (the default behavior), or optionally leaving the description up to a maximum length specified by the user and/or optionally leaving content which is a URL. In all cases, duplicate headlines are removed and the first instance of the repeated headline is annotated to indicate that more than one occurrence was found.

Revised: 26 Mar 1998