TABLE OF CONTENTS In the previous chapter you learned how to add subscription and eventing support to your device. There is only one final piece of functionality to add: Presentation. In this chapter you learn what it means for a device to support presentation and how you can create a presentation page.
At any given point in time, there are going to be a number of UPnP devices on the network. Up until now, the only way to find out more information about a device is to have a control point application discover it and invoke a series of service actions. But what if a customdesigned control point application isn t available? It would still be nice to find out information about the device. This is the purpose of presentation pages.
Simply put, UPnP presentation pages are HTML-based Web pages, hosted by a device that can be viewed in any web browser on the network. Instead of having a complex control point application, users can view information about a device by simply pulling up its presentation page in a web browser.
Presentation pages can provide many different types of information, ranging from static information held in the device description document (manufacturer, model, version, and so on) to dynamic information about current state variable values. Enterprising devices can even offer the ability to invoke actions from a presentation page, although this is uncommon.
The level of support in a device presentation page is entirely...
