Example transparent path junction

Create a transparent path junction (/docs) to the back-end server backend_host.myco.com:

pdadmin> server task web1-webseald-WebSEALHost create -t tcp -x -h backend_host.myco.com /docs

After a client request for a back-end resource is made (via the WebSEAL proxy server), a response page is returned from backend_host.myco.com containing the following link (URL) in the HTML of that page:

http://backend_host.myco.com/docs/readme.html

WebSEAL's standard filtering mechanism for junctions parses the HTML in the response page and modifies this link by changing the original absolute expression of the URL to a server-relative expression. However, the path is not filtered, because this is a transparent path junction (-x). Link as it now appears to the user:

/docs/readme.html

If rewrite-absolute-with-absolute was set to "yes", the link would appear as:

http://WebSEALHost/docs/readme.html

Now the user clicks the link to access the back-end resource (readme.html).

The portion of the URL representing the junction name (/docs) is recognized by WebSEAL as associated with the /docs subdirectory on the back-end server, backend_host.myco.com. As a conclusion to the example, WebSEAL successfully locates the resource at:

http://backend_host.myco.com/docs/readme.html

Some benefits of transparent path junctions include:

• Several different transparent path junctions to the same back-end server can be created to point to different regions (subdirectories) of that server.

• Each individual transparent path junction can handle a different authentication requirement and ACL control.

Parent topic: Transparent path junctions