Hi,

Thanks to all your suggestions, we are going ahead with IBI Webfocus Dashboard for the front-end to support the reports generated by WebFocus in back-end. Still we have few data update screens which can't be accomplished through webfocus architechture. So we are planning to develop the data update screens in J2EE and Reporting piece in WebFocus. So I need to know whether it is possible to have both WebFocus and Java in the front end and route to reporting or business layer based on the request from the presentation layer. The flow should look like the following diagram.

Data update                            Reporting
|___________________________|
                          |
                     Presentation Layer
_____________|_____________
|                                                    |
Business Layer                         Reporting Layer

If anybody have worked on this type of flow, Please share with me the info about the complexity involved in arriving.

Also please let me know whether the front-end (menu, frames, etc) designed from Dashboard can be reused for any other HTML files, Since we need to have the same 'look and feel' for both reporting and data update piece.

Thanks in Advance,
Geeya.

What type of data do you have that Webfocus Maintain/Modify can not be accomplished for Update functionalities? We used some Java classes to do jobs in the background but not in the front end. WebFocus Maintain/Modify can update many different types of data. If it is SQL or Oracle, you need to have adapters installed and generate synonym through webfocus server console and create ODBC connection, we are on the way to go to use WebFocus Maintain.

Thanks Lusheng,

We had already discussed to use Maintain for data update part with the architecture group and they are not ready to go with Maintain coz of company standards. That's the reason we had arrived to this approach.

Thanks,
Geeya.

Geeya,

I've done similar things in the past without too much effort. If you need things tightly integrated (i.e. i want to share common security/sessions/cookies etc.), I would suggest deploying your app components under the web focus web app. For example, build your java framework as per normal, then change the web focus deployment descriptor to include your new servlet and servlet mappings. After that, it is just a matter of the action on your forms calling the correct "Controller".

Just a note: despite the 2.2 servlet api reference (in WF 71x and earlier), anything from 5.3 and up are 2.3 complient.

Thanks Dhagen,

From your answer, I understand that the Java based functionalities can be implemented in Java and can be deployed in WebFocus web app. This is great to know. So I assume that we can use the Dashboard authentication/authorization for those Java pages also. Can you please confirm whether my assumption is correct.

Thanks,
Geeya

Geeya, I addressed exposing the .jsp's in bid in your other post. However, that does not prevent someone from calling the .jsp directly. Just because you incorporate your sevlets and jsps in WF does not mean you can automatically inherit the authentication and authorization's that are assosiated with MRE and BID. There is a lot of options for implementing or piggy backing off of the existing authentication, but it really depends on what you need to do. Off the top of my head, you could write to the session during the WF signon (in the site.wfs). The .jsp's and servlets can then look to the session to see the current state of user authentication before fullfilling the request.

Thanks Dhagen for your response.

We can handle the authentication by assigning a session variable from BID/MRE authentication and validate the same in servlets and JSPs. I want to know whether we can route the request to specific Java pages based on the signed-in user. For Ex. Role A has access to report R1 and JSP J1. The webfocus security should look at the role of the signed-in user and authorize him to access Report R1 and JSP J1. I definetly think it can be possible in WebFocus. Please confirm me the same.

Thanks in advance.