Using custom .html pages on Web Enabled Forms

[Rich Cassell]

Hey,

We've been using Web Enabled Forms to run our web applications for a while now. We have plans to upgrade our Jade systems at some point in the future in order to utilise the .Net framework and make an updated version of the systems, but due to our servers running 32-bit, there's a large and costly process to do that so it might be a while yet...

We have recently had requests from certain customers to upgrade a couple of the screens that have hit the html limitations that Jade Web Enabled Forms have, so we're now under a bit more pressure to react and make the screens more useable.

One option we're wanting to explore, on the short term, is to create our own .html pages that we can use rather than the ones that Jade creates. Can this be done? I know in the WebSession's reply method the created html is sent to the web browser, is it possible to hijack this and send a custom made page instead? Of course, the main issue is then reading back the instructions from the new html page when the user does something, which i assume would utilise a post method?!

Has anybody done any work of this nature before? This is merely a stop-gap for us until we can get the upgrades completed that allow us to use .Net. We're currently running Jade 6.2.

Any help will be very appreciated

Thanks!

Rich

[Rich Cassell]

Hey all!

As it's been a week i'm assuming this is either really simple and i'm being daft ... Or, surprisingly difficult and nobody knows the answer ... I'm assuming the former to be honest!

Either that, or it's related to this being thread #1000

[bdoolan]

Hi Rich,
The White Paper HTML Thin Client Using HTML Documents is probably what you want to read and base your solution on. Other useful ones are Web Services in JADE, Web Services Security in JADE and Web Services Tips.

I'm not sure if you intend to have the automatically generated webforms in the same Application as the hand crafted ones?? If so, you're out of luck since the WebSession objects are different - one is transient, the other is persistent. You'd need two different Jade Applications for these (which could co-exist) and different URLs for each application. Depending on what functions are in which application, this could cause some synchronisationn issues, and possibly make the front end a bit clunky.

However, if the HTML Documents app is a temporary stopgap measure and has only a small number of specialised webforms, it should be possible to implement what you're after.

Hope this helps.

Brendan

[Rich Cassell]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for your reply . I'll take a look through the documentation and see what i can get working!

As it happens, my intention was to create a parallel application which uses the hand crafted html pages, from your descriptions it sounds like that's better anyway. I figured it'd be simpler to do that than getting it all synchronized, but also, it gives us an opportunity to overhaul the look-and-feel of the system in it's entirety.

Thanks again,

Rich

[Rich Cassell]

Hi all,

To try and solve this issue i've been using the webInsert control with which i have referenced the hand-crafted HTML file. This works fine in terms of the reply side of things, in that the screen i'm expecting to see is showing on the web browser. My issue is regarding the processRequest side of the application, where the user has performed an event (such as a button click) and i need to run the code.

The screen is empty other than the webInsert control, so no buttons etc exist other than what's in the HTML file. When i press the button on the screen, it goes through the processRequest method as expected and then into the load method of the relevant form. At this point, i'm not really sure what i should be doing... In Jade Forms, usually, it would have gone straight into the relevant event method of the control being used and run the code in there, but the button control does not exist in the IDE, so i can't make it do that...

Do i have to somehow parse the queryString coming back from processRequest in order to call the relevant code... Or am i just way off the mark and doing it all wrong!

Any help will be very appreciated.

Rich