Overview of PageGate Web Interface Transcript for Video:
Welcome to the overview of the GetWeb interface. In this tutorial, we’ll be going over how GetWeb functions and how to pass parameters to its CGI executable.
The GetWeb interface provides a CGI executable and a series of pre-formatted templates to publish messaging websites hosted on a web server. This allows you to host messaging websites on your local intranet or, if GetWeb is interfaced with an outward facing web server, on the internet.
Web Developers can also use this web server interface to send GET/POST requests to notify PageGate when a message needs to be sent, who the message should go to, who sent the message and what the message should say.
This interface can also be used to enable PageGate to receive notifications from applications running on different platforms (Unix, Mac, etc.).
Let’s start with the interface’s basic setup screen.
Enabled determines whether the interface is configured to run or not.
The Web Pages Path determines the location on the web server where PageGate will publish your messaging website(s). This field should be set to a directory on the web server where new content should be created. For example, if you have IIS installed locally with the Default Website referencing the default IIS location, you would set this field to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\
The CGI Data Path determines the location on the web server where PageGate will host its CGI executable. This field should be set to the web server's scripting directory and there are a few CGI related permissions you’ll need to set for it, which we’ll go over in the GetWeb configuration tutorial.
CGI URL determines the URL used in the FORM action and should be set to the URL and directory of the web server hosting webgate.exe
For example, if you have IIS installed locally and are using its default configuration, you would use
http://your-web-server/scripts/webgate.exe
The webgate CGI can be used with either a POST or GET method.
Polling Interval determines how often, in seconds, the GetWeb interface will look for output from the CGI handler.
PageGate comes with six stock templates that can be completely customized to your specifications; they’re really just intended to provide a basic example of how our CGI executable and we’ll go in to more detail on what each template looks like and does in the GetWeb configuration tutorial.
For now, let’s get a better understanding of how the basic CGI executable works and is called.
PageGate’s CGI executable, webgate.exe, can be called with either POST or GET method.
The POST method can be used by creating a form on your webpage which points to webgate.exe in the FORM ACTION statement.
The three variables webgate.exe is expecting to see are USER, FRM and MSG.
USER specifies who the message should go to.
FRM specifies who or what sent the message.
MSG specifies the text to be sent.
The GET method is more popular with scripting languages such as JavaScript and Java. It allows the GetWeb CGI to be called with a command similar to one that could be entered into a browser's URL field.
For more sophisticated webpages that use javascript, java, or any higher-end language than HTML, the webgate.exe CGI program can be called directly rather than using it only with an HTML form. Here is a sample command that can be used in the URL field in a browser to call webgate.exe:
http://www.mydomain.com/scripts/webgate.exe?USER=it_dept&FRM=HR&MSG=This+is+a+test
This would send a message to the recipient 'it_dept', from the sender 'HR', with a message of 'This is a test'
As shown in the example above, the three variables webgate.exe is expecting to see are USER, FRM and MSG.
USER specifies who the message should go to.
FRM specifies who or what sent the message.
MSG specifies the text to be sent.
So, you could use any of the GetWeb interface’s stock templates but you can also have anything capable of using the GET/POST methods communicate with our CGI executable to notify PageGate when a message needs to be sent, who the message should go to, who sent the message and what the message should say.
This concludes the overview of the PageGate’s GetWeb interface.
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