Visual LANSA Forum

Now that our mobile web app is nearing production status, we are looking at ways of getting to the app easier.

One of those ways is a "vanity" url so that the user goes to ourserver.com/ourapp or ourserver.com/ourapp.html instead of ourserver.com:4580/dcxpgmlib/sys/mobwebapp.html.

I've been doing some research on using vanity urls with apache and my head is spinning in confusion.

I understand that this means we have to have a HTTP Server responding to port 80 in addition to the LANSA Web Server responding on 4580 (which we do). But what I am not understanding is how to get port 80 server to silently (i.e. not change the browser URL) forward the request to the LANSA Web Server.

Has anyone done anything like this? How did you do it?

Thanks,
Joe

Hi Joe,

I'm still inclined to create an index.html, as described in:

http://vlforum.lansa.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=47

so the URL can just be www.myserver.com/myapp and it will default to the index.html inside that folder.

(We're looking at formalizing this idea so the deployment tool will do it for you.)


I'm sure there are ways of redirecting URL's that will do the job as well, but I haven't tried it myself, I agree it doesn't look easy. Maybe someone else will comment on this thread.

Cheers,
Danny

To do this, you will need to create a webserver running on (eg. port 80), using the ibm web console.

Assuming you did that, modify the httpd.conf for this webserver to have:

this at the top and something like this at the bottom: This should allow you to browse to http://ourserver.com/ourapp/ and end up with your app showing (without changing the location in the browser).

You may need to adjust image locations if they are loaded from '/images' (although a rule could be added for that...)

We ended up with a client side redirect solution. Not super happy with it but it works (sort of, more later).

Since we a have a web server on the iSeries running on port 80, I dropped an ourapp.html file at the root. Inside the html is a meta refresh to the correct url.

It works great with pretty much every thing, except Android, although not, Android's, LANSA's or the iSeries fault. The reason it does not work and one the core reasons for trying to do this as that we have to access the app through VMWare's AirWatch Browser. Frankly, I don't have anything good to say about that browser. For some reason, the Android version of that browser blocks websites with long urls, although it works fine in iOS. Our IT guy is trying to figure it out, but is not having much success.

Which is the whole reason for the silent url rewrite. Would like to get the URL rewrite solution working at some point but have to move on to other things now.

Thanks Danny and Brendan for the info.

Perhaps you can take a look at tinyurl too:

http://tinyurl.com/

Does the job quite simply.

I have read several of the forum posts on "short url" etc and hopefully this is the best topic to pose my question.

Our IBM i runs the apache web server for our VL Web applications.
I have the mod_rewrite module on for http to https, and for correcting the url to use with VL15.
I use an index.html document to meta refresh to the main VL web application log in page.
All good so far.

We now have another VL application running from the same web server, and looking to use a similar method to end up with a shorter URL that has to be typed in.

In the root (/www/webserver/htdocs) folder where the index.html document is, I have created a new page_name.html doc with the new meta refresh statement.

In the browser, if I type in www.mywebserver.com/page_name.html the new VL application opens and runs fine.
So, I know the app will run fine, and I know the page_name.html can be found.

My question is how to get the RewriteRule correctly written, so that the end user does not have to type in the .html extention?
Goal: www.mywebserver.com/page_name will redirect (or pass through) to www.mywebserver.com/page_name.html and execute.

My current Rewrite cond & rules, and it is the last rule that is not working:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^80$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://www.mywebserver.net/$1 [R,NC,N]
RewriteRule ^/vl/(.*)$ /Lansa_install_lib/partition/$1.html [NC,PT,L]
#
# - rewrite redirect rules for specific named pages:
RewriteRule ^page_name/$ /page_name.html [PT,NC,L]