318 Part IV — Google Earth Hacks
FIGURE16-4: Viewing the dynamic Grantham entities.Here you can see that the resulting folder structure is more or less identical to that produced
using the static option. The difference is that the information is being loaded from KML that
has been generated dynamically. Now the database can be updated and the Google Earth
application can load the updates. The information is manually refreshed when you open the
application, when you re-select the Network Link, or when you specifically request a refresh by
right-clicking the Network Link and selecting Refresh.Using the Auto-Update Function
The network source for KML can be further enhanced by enabling the auto-update function.
Using this option, the network KML source is regularly reloaded at an interval that you can
specify. To demonstrate this functionality in action, first change the Grantham network
resource to automatically reload at specific intervals. Right-click the link generated in the pre-
vious option and select Edit. You should see the window in Figure 16-5.Click the checkbox for Refresh Parameters and then set the parameters. You can specify that
the refresh occurs at specified intervals or when the view changes (including setting a delay
after the view has changed).Within the book, it’s difficult to demonstrate this in perfect action, but you can see some sim-
ple changes. First, see Figure 16-6, which shows Google Earth and the dynamic KML in its
initial state. Refresh has been set for every five minutes.