Here is the high level, birds-eye view of the process involved in creating this channel:

You create a cookie for the user that contains a the user's unique ID. You keep a database on your server that contains a list of every user, along with his genre preferences.

When the M-Business Sync Server accesses The Movie Review Channel's front page, you would look up the cookie for the user (retrieved from the M-Business Sync Server) to obtain his ID. You can use that ID to look up a list of his preferences and generate a custom list of movie reviews for him to read.

What if he wants to change his preferences? You can provide him with a form that allows him to check or uncheck his movie preferences. This form, once submitted, will alter his preferences stored on your database.

What if this is his first time visiting our channel? We can also determine that by a cookie; specifically, the lack of one. In that case, it is often a good idea to present your user with some default content, along with a prominent message telling him to customize his preferences.

Here are a couple of pages of the Movie Review Channel in action. The figure below shows the default list of movies that appears when user first visits the site, before a cookie has been set up.

The figure below shows a form on which a user can select custom categories that the user is interested in.

The following figure shows a standard form submission dialogue box, presented when user taps Submit. We will improve on this later, in Managing Channel Form Submissions.

The figure below shows the customized Movie Channel home page, generated by using ID in cookie to look up user preferences in a database.