8.2 Customizing Status Pages

Customizing status pages is achieved by hosting equivalents of the standard status pages on your own web server. This gives full flexiblility of what can be displayed on a custom status page.

When you have created custom status pages, Oracle IRM Server can be made to redirect status page requests to a specified URL. The redirection includes information about the operation that was being performed by Oracle IRM Desktop. This allows the custom status pages to be at least as informative as the supplied status pages.

The redirection of the status page requests can be performed using either of two HTTP methods: HTTP GET or HTTP POST.

8.2.1 Redirection of Status Page Requests Using HTTP GET

When the redirection of status page requests is performed using HTTP GET, all of the information about the state of Oracle IRM Desktop must be encoded in the query string of the URL that is to serve the custom page. To avoid overly long query strings containing information that is not required by the custom page, only the configured redirection URL acts as a template for the URL that is used.

For example, consider a status page that is only concerned with the type of status page requested and the classification name. If the page is to be served by a page at http://some.example.com/statusPage then the URL could be configured as below:

http://some.example.com/statusPage?page=&irm-classification-name=

When the redirection is for a classification called 'Top Secret' and where a license has expired, the request would be populated as below:

http://some.example.com/statusPage?page=LICENSE_EXPIRED=&irm-classification-name=Top+Secret

The parameters can be chosen from a list of built-in parameters, and from all of the content attributes supported by the server. In the above example, page is a built-in parameter and irm-classification-name is a content attribute.

Note:

You can design the redirection query string to contain other parameters. Parameters that have already been populated by Oracle IRM and parameters not recognized by Oracle IRM will be left untouched.

The maximum size of URL that can be processed by Microsoft Internet Explorer is 2048 characters.

8.2.2 Redirection of Status Page Requests Using HTTP POST

The HTTP POST method sends all of the available Oracle IRM Desktop state information as a form to the configured URL. The advantage is that all of the Oracle IRM Desktop state information is available without having to consider the size of the URL. JavaScript must be available on the client computer.

The page parameter is passed as part of the URL. So:

http://some.example.com/status

will result in a post to:

http://some.example.com/status?page=LICENSE_EXPIRED

The Oracle IRM Desktop state is provided as XML, with the relevant information picked out by the developer of the custom status page. The page parameter is still sent as part of the URL query string, because this is how it is received from Oracle IRM Desktop.

See Example 8-1, "Desktop State in XML Form".