BROWSE CATDV SUPPORT MANUALS

CatDV Server 6.8 provides three distinct technologies for accessing CatDV functionality via a web browser:

  1. The CatDV Web Client – is a rich Internet application that aims to provide an experience similar to using the desktop client – but in a web browser. It provides some customisation options, such as changing the logo it displays in its banner bar, and customising the tabs that are displayed based on the production group defined details panels.  However the overall look and feel and the functionality provided are fixed.
  2. Live HTML Publisher – is a server-side web technology based on Java JSP. It provides a JSP tag library that allows a web designer to embed list of catalogs and clips into web pages they design and allow users to perform simple queries. The look and feel of the resultant web site is completely under the control of the web designer.
  3. Ajax Samples – using the new REST API. These samples are pure client-side HTML/JavaScript applications that use AJAX to access the new CatDV Server REST API. Again the look and feel is completely under the control of the web designer.

Deploying a Custom Web Interface

The best way to create a custom web interface to CatDV Server is to base it on one of the web samples (or a combination of them).  The web samples (both Live HTML and AJAX) are shipped in a file called websamples.jar in the installation directory. By default the built-in web server points at this file, so if you navigate to the root of the CatDV Web Server you will see the unmodified web sample home page.

To deploy these files (ready for subsequent modification)  you should copy the websample.war file to another directory outside the CatDV Server installation folder (this avoids it being overwritten next time you upgrade CatDV Server). If you rename the file to websamples.zip you will be able to unpack it using the built-in archiving tools on either Windows or Mac OS. If you then update the Document Root setting of the built-in web server using the CatDV Server Control Panel (in the Setup Wizard, Web Server tab) then the web server will serve the web files from their new location.

Modifying the Web Samples

The web samples are created using standard web technologies such as HTML/CSS, JavaScrip/jQuery, AJAX and JSP and it is beyond the scope of this documentation to describe those technologies.

However documentation for the CatDV specific technologies used can be found here:

Any changes made to the copied sample files will be visible immediately via the CatDV Server web server, so it is easy to make gradual modifications to create the look that you require.

The CatDV Web Client

Note that the CatDV Web Client itself is not part of the web samples bundle. It is built into CatDV Server itself and is always available using  the relative URL ‘/catdv2’. You should therefore avoid creating a directory called catdv2 in you custom web interface.