Webace - AceDB on the web [ Configure | Help ]

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Webace installation


Requirements

Before you start it is assumed that you have the following installed on your system.

Setting up gifaceserver with rpc

Refer to the installation guide for aceserver, specifically the section on installing aceserver to run as inetd daemon. Note that for this implementation of webace the gifaceserver rather than the aceserver is required - this is only available as part of acedb 4.5 or later.

Compiling aceclient into perl

See the aceclient documentation for instructions on how to compile aceclient as an extension to perl 5.

Installing cgi-bin scripts

Simply copy the files from the cgi-bin in this distribution to your cgi-bin, and make sure that they are executable. You may need to edit the first line of the file to point to the proper perl executable (with aceclient compiled in). Note that these cgi scripts use Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm perl module, which you must also install (version 2.36 or later is required). The Javascript files in the js directory should also be copied to the webserver into a top level directory js (htdocs/js, to appear at http://yourserver/js). The following line should be appended to the mime configuration file of the web server (conf/mime.types on NCSA, apache)

        application/x-javascript       js

Installing acelib

Move the acelib directory into a directory in perl's search path (such as /usr/local/lib/perl). To find out the diretories perl checks for library files, try perl -e 'print join(" ", @INC) . "\n";'. (A good location is /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl)

Customizing webace

At minimum, you will have to edit acelib/hostinfo.pl and acelib/dbinfo to provide the information required by the cgi-bin scripts; their contents should be self-explanatory.

One new element in this file is the 'gifdir' field of the acelib/dbinfo file. This should specify a directory visable to both the gifaceserver and the WWW server. The gifaceserver writes files there which are both read and deleted by cgi scripts of the WWW server, so this directory must be read/writeable by both processes.

Further, you may wish to add a set of markup rules to add links from objects in your database(s) to other sources on the web. You can have a global set of rules in acelib/global_markup.pl, and each database can have its own set of rules in wspec/markup.pl. The basic format for these rules is described in A World-Wide Web Server for ACEDB based on Tace.

The script opt2emr.pl included in this release parses models.wrm, and for any class which makes use of a graphical display, a rule that generates a 'view graphic' link is automatically made for that class. Just type opt2emr.pl > wspec/markup.pl.

15/3/98, webace@sanger.ac.uk