About integrating with a web-based system

To integrate with a web-based maintenance management system, you first need to determine how to display the Meridian Explorer web page from system’s user interface. Several options are available:

• IFrame: This technique is convenient when the pages of the maintenance management system are generated by scripts (such as JavaScript or ASP) and the scripts may be customized. Add an IFrame (inline frame) to the maintenance management system’s web page and set the URL of this frame to the Meridian Explorer home page. This technique provides seamless integration because the user sees the module’s web page as part of the maintenance management system.
• Hyperlink: This technique is convenient when you can add configurable hyperlinks to the maintenance management system’s pages. Add a hyperlink to a page of the maintenance management system that points to the Meridian Explorer home page. When desired, the page can be shown as a pop-up. In that case, it may be desirable to reuse the pop-up window to avoid opening a new pop-up each time the user clicks the hyperlink. This technique provides an integration that is less seamless than an IFrame, but is still usable.
• Button: This technique can be useful when security requirements do not allow users direct access to the Asset Management Module. Add a button to a page of the maintenance management system that directs the user to the Meridian Explorer home page. With this technique, the button can be set up to post a form back to the maintenance management system web server, which then redirects the user to Meridian Explorer. This technique is more complicated than using a hyperlink, but it allows the maintenance management system to do server-side processing before the user is shown the documents. The post back can be used to retrieve the web page from Meridian Explorer and pass the result on to the user.

Depending on the technique that you choose to show the Meridian Explorer home page, you know where in the maintenance management system’s user interface the URL needs to be generated. Arguments must be retrieved from the user’s maintenance management system session and combined with the Meridian Explorer base URL to form a complete URL. A complete URL has the following components:

<BaseURL>?<Argument1>=<Value1>&<Argument2>=<Value2>...

Where:

<BaseURL> is the URL to the home.aspx page of Meridian Explorer.

Each <Argument> is the name of an argument to be passed to Meridian Explorer. Arguments can have any name; the only requirement is that they match the argument names in the filters configured in Creating and editing item filters.

It is convenient to keep the argument names short, yet descriptive, for example eqnum for equipment number.

Each <Value> is the value for its associated argument. This data must be retrieved from the user’s session in the maintenance management system.

For example:

http://<ServerName>/ExplorerClient/Home.aspx?VIEWID=DOC_E91E5&DOCFILTER=docfab&eqnum=11430&locnr=L11

How you retrieve the argument values depends entirely on the capabilities of the maintenance management system. The following topics describe some, but not all possibilities.