Recital Web Getting Started

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Overview

Recital Web is a data centric HTTP Server that incorporates a Database and 4GL. Using Recital Web you can generate dynamic content web pages with the Recital/4GL. Recital Web can coexist with the existing Web Server on your system, so there is no disruption to your existing web site infrastructure. Using Recital Web, you can generate rich reports that can be integrated in with Recital Mirage .NET applications or Recital Terminal applications.

RSP Basics

The Recital Web HTTP server handles the generation of dynamic content HTML and sends this back to the browser that requested the page. These pages have a ".rsp" extension (Recital Server Page). Recital Firecat can serve static html pages, images, and Recital Server Pages (.rsp pages) similar to the way PHP dynamic pages are generated. With Recital Firecat .rsp pages, you can embed Recital/4GL scripting commands inside HTML documents. Recital Server Pages are really just HTML files with Recital/4GL scripting embedded within them. Any scripting commands that are embedded within the file are executed then removed from the results. All scripting code is hidden from the user viewing your web pages.

Tags

To distinguish the RSP code from the regular HTML inside the .rsp file, RSP code is placed between <% and %> tags. The tag combination notifies the Firecat HTTP Server that the code within the <% and %> should be executed by the server and removed from the results. Any output generated by the Recital/4GL code (e.g. using the ? command) will be written to the HTML output that is sent back to the web browser that requested the page.

The following example generates an HTML table that lists all the records in the Suppliers table. 

<html>
<body>
<table>
<%
    open database southwind
    use suppliers
    scan
        ? "<tr>"
        for f=1 to fldcount()
            ? "<td>"
            ? &(field(f))
            ? "</td>"
        next
      ? "</tr>"
    endscan
    use
    close databases
%>
</table>
</body>
</html>

You can also echo the result of inline expressions directly using the <%= and %> tags. 

<input type="text" name="customer_name" value="<%= &(field(1)) %>">

Firecat/RSP also recognizes several directives. These are enclosed within <%@ and %>. The following directives are handled. 

<%@ include="xxx" %>

This directive allows you to include either other RSP files, JavaScript files or HTML files within your .rsp page. This provides the ability to build library pages that can be reused by many .rsp pages. 

<%@ codebehind=".wsp filename" %>

This directive allows you to write a .wsp file (Recital program file with a .wsp extension) which can be used to dynamically generate and output the HTML. The advantage of using this approach is that you can edit the .wsp file in Recital Enterprise Studio with full color syntax highlighting and IntelliHelp. If you use this approach, it is advisable to keep all of the .wsp files in the scripts subdirectory of webroot. e.g. 

<%@ codebehind="scripts/myproc.wsp" %>

When you use Recital Enterprise Studio to develop and test your .rsp pages, it will automatically synchronize JavaScript and .wsp files into the wwwscripts directory and images (.gif, .jpg, and .png) into the wwwimages directory.

Quick Start Guide

  1. Create or add an existing RSP page to your project. To add existing RSP pages to the project, select Project|Add Files To Project... from the Menu Bar .
  2. Test the RSP page by right clicking on it in the "Project Explorer" then choose "Run".

Tip If you use the attribute <%@ codebehind="scripts/filename.wsp" %> in the RSP file, you can edit the Recital 4GL code with full syntax color highlighting and IntelliHelp.

  1. Use the showdocument() function in your server based Mirage application to send the request for an RSP page and for the content to be generated dynamically and then rendered in the browser on the desktop PC. 
showDocument("http://" + getLocalHost() + ":8001/myrspfile.rsp", "_blank")

Note By default the Firecat web server listens on port 8001 so this must be postfixed to the hostname that it is running on as is specified in the sample code above. You can however configure it to run on port 80 also, or alternatively use the Recital ISAPI filter on Windows or the Apache loadable module (mod_recital) on Linux/UNIX.

Default page

The DB_WWWDEFAULT environment variable can be set to point to a default page that will be referenced if a URL is given which does not have a page specified. If this is not found, then Firecat will use the page default.rsp. e.g. http://localhost:8001 Would reference: http://localhost:8001/default.rsp

Array Variables

Server configuration and request information, including form parameters are accessible from several public arrays that are created automatically by the Firecat web server when it is servicing a request for a page. The elements stored in these public arrays can be accessed by name e.g. 

// get the hostname for the remote machine requesting the page
host = _server["REMOTE_HOST"]

_SERVER[ ] array

The _SERVER[] array can include the following:

Argument Description Example SERVER_SOFTWARE A string that identifies the server Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) SERVER_NAME The hostname, DNS alias, or IP address for self referencing URLs www.yoursite.com SERVER_PROTOCOL The name and revision of the requested protocol HTTP/1.1 SERVER_PORT The server port number to which the request was sent 8001 REQUEST_METHOD The method the client used to fetch the document GET PATH_INFO Extra path elements given by the client /list/records PATH_TRANSLATED The value of the PATH_INFO translated by the server into a full path /usr/recital/webroot/list/records SCRIPT_NAME The URL path of the current page /list/records/customers.rsp QUERY_STRING Everything after the ? in the URL count=10&data=true REMOTE_HOST The hostname of the machine that requested this page mypc.mydomain.com REMOTE_ADDR A string containing the IP address of the machine that requested the page 192.168.0.100 CONTENT_TYPE The content type of the information attached to queries such as PUT and POST x-url-encoded CONTENT_LENGTH The length of the information attached to queries such as PUT and POST 3866 AUTH_TYPE The authorization realm BASIC (This is the only one supported) REMOTE_USERNAME The username specified after response.authenticate() REMOTE_PASSWORD The password specified after response.authenticate() HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING Acceptable methods of content encoding gzip, deflate HTTP_UA_CPU User agent processor type x86 HTTP_USER_AGENT Browser id or user-agent string identifying the browser Mozilla/4.0 (...) HTTP_CONNECTION Connection type Keep-Alive HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL Client cache instructions no-cache HTTP_REFERER URL of referring document http://www.yoursite.com:8001/default.rsp

_GET[ ] and _POST[ ] arrays

It is easy to process forms in the Firecat/RSP as the forms parameters are available in the _GET[ ] and _POST[ ] arrays. Use these arrays to access form parameters from your Recital/4GL code in the Firecat/RSP page. The key to the arrays elements are the parameter names and the values are the values of those parameters.

_COOKIE[ ] array

This array contains all of the cookies that are sent from the client browser when a page is requested. You reference these by cookies name. You can send cookies to the client browser (session state can be saved and restored) using the response.addcookie() method call. (See the response object below for further details).

_ARGS[ ] array

You can reference the value of any arguments passed to the Firecat/RSP page by referencing them by name in the _ARGS[ ] array.

Request Object

When a web page is requested, along with the HTTP request, information such as the URL of the web page request and the format of the data requested is also passed. It can also contain the name and contents of form variables on the user's form that requested the page. The response object allows you to control the way the server interacts with the browser.. The methods that can be specified are as follows:

Argument Description Example

WRITE Writes a string of text response.write("") REDIRECT Redirects to another URL response.redirect("http://www.recital.com") WRITEFILE Writes out the contents of a file. Note: the path is relative to DB_WWWROOT response.writefile("/temp/myreport.html") APPENDTOLOG Writes a line of text to the Recital system log response.appendtolog("opening database southwind") FLUSH Flushes out the buffers and sends to the browser response.flush() CLEAR Clears (resets) the output buffer response.clear() ADDHEADER Sends response headers response.addheader("Content-Type", "text/plain") ADDCOOKIE Sends a cookie to the browser response.addcookie("my_cookie_name", "my_cookie_value") AUTHENTICATE Causes the browser to prompt for a username/password response.authenticate() IMPERSONATEUSER Impersonates the specified user. This is used to handle file permissions for accessing pages. response.impersonateUser("username","password") Special note: When sending response headers or cookies, these must be sent before any text that is output. Cookie data is automatically converted to a string value when stored, but can only be retrieved as a string. Example of response.addcookie() 
// get the hostname for the remote machine requesting the page
host = _server["REMOTE_HOST"]
 
<%@ Language="Recital" %> 
<html> 
<head> 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> 
<% response.addcookie("foo","bar") %> 
<title>Recital Request Object</title> 
</head> 
<body> 
<% 
? date() 
? time() 
? "<br><br>" 
cc=len(_COOKIE) 
if cc > 0 
   ? "Active session Cookies ("+alltrim(str(cc))+")" 
   for i = 1 to cc 
     ? "<br>   &i " 
     ? _COOKIE[&i] 
   next 
else 
   ? "There are no active session cookies." 
endif 
? "<br><br>Press the refresh key." 
%> 
</body> 
</html>
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