Understanding Web Access

Meridian allows vaults to be accessed through its Web Access feature using Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Web Access provides the web application hosted by IIS and Internet Explorer acts as the client. A system administrator publishes a vault as a website in IIS using the Meridian Enterprise Administrator tool.

Meridian Web Access is an Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) application that runs as part of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Web Access processes requests from web browsers, retrieves data from the AutoManager EDM Server, and passes information back to the web browsers in the form of HTML pages.

Inside Web Access, HTML pages are created as illustrated in the following figure:

Web Access first creates XML pages that contain pure data (no presentation) to be exposed by Web Access. The XML pages are then converted into HTML. During this step, information about the way the data should be presented on the screen is added. How the information is presented is determined by a set of templates (*.xsl), which are encoded in XSLT, and a style sheet named amm.css.

By default, the .xsl templates are located on the IIS server in the \Inetpub\AMM\Templates folder, and amm.css is located in the \Inetpub\AMM\Src folder. The templates provided with Web Access contain intelligence that optimizes the generated HTML files for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Due to the complexity of XSLT, we do not recommend customizing these templates. For more information on customizing Web Access, see the BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise Configuration Guide.