Ops,

you're right, I had a false memory, that getItems does not personalize the item name cause we decided to not user user names for our demos, my bad

About the "broken" name, is called that way cause that metadata adapter inherits from the LiteralBasedProvider whose impleemtnation of getItems is to split the received string on the space character (hence the "broken" name as "broken in pieces").
Using such metadata adapter permts to use an "Item List" on the client.

see http://www.lightstreamer.com/docs/client_javascript_uni_api/Subscription.html for some details:

an Item List is an array of Strings each one representing an item. For the Item List to be correctly interpreted a LiteralBasedProvider or a MetadataProvider with a compatible implementation of getItems has to be configured in the associated Adapter Set.