Linked Server Views embedded application UI

Linked Server views provide a mechanism for embedding your web UI within Adapt to provide seamless integration between the two products. The full documentation for linked server views can be found here.

A Linked Server view is a page that can be added to the main Adapt navigation model to embed some part of the UI of an integrated application served from a different server into Adapt. A Linked Server can make use of the Web Services API and Javascript Services to interact with the Adapt session it is running within.

A Linked Server view can be thought of as an IFRAME within the Adapt UI and the embedded application is therefore free to draw whatever interface it wants to. When a user navigates away from a Linked Server view the IFRAME is hidden, when they navigate back it is revealed.

In addition when the Linked Server view is loaded information to validate the Adapt session loading it, and to implement single sign-on, is automatically appended to the URL.

Creating a Linked Server View

The first step in creating a Linked Server view is to create the web page that will act as the initial start point for your application's UI. This could be an existing page in your application, but typically you would create a specific page - especially if you want to perform session validation or implement single sign-on

With your page created there are 3 steps needed to make it visible in Adapt:

1. Create a JSP page in the Adapt templates directory that will invoke your UI page
2. Create an Adapt view using the configuration tool and connect it to the JSP page
3. Add the new view to the main navigation menu

Steps 2 and 3 require configuration and should be referred back to the System Administrator.

Linked Server JSP

Here is the minimum boiler plate for a Linked Server JSP:

 <%@ page isELIgnored="false" %>
 <%@ taglib uri="/common/taglibs/c.tld" prefix="c" %>
 <%@ taglib uri="/common/taglibs/fn.tld" prefix="fn" %>
 <%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/custom_view_services/adapt_tags_v1.tld" prefix="bond" %>

 <bond:load-linked-server
	url=""
	title=""
	serverName=""
	useAuthID="true">
	CONFIG DATA GOES HERE
 </bond:load-linked-server>

The URL should be the URL of your intial web page (e.g. http://wwww.myapplication.com/myAdaptPage.htm), the title will be displayed in the Adapt UI header area and the server name is used when validating the session. Any additional information that you want available to your application should replace the words CONFIG DATA GOES HERE.

Single Sign-on and Session Validation

When the useAuthID parameter on the Linked Server JSP is set to true, additional parameters are automatically added to the URL specified in the url paramater. If you want to perform session validation or single sign-on you should retrieve these parameters and make use of the callback URLs that Adapt provides for this purpose. Full details can be found in the Linked Servers documentation.

These callbacks allow you to check the validity of the authorisation information and retrive the Adapt User ID of the user making the call. By mapping Adapt User IDs to users of your application you can perform single sign-on.