8.3 Acquiring Oracle IRM Status Information

This section describes how your system can acquire Oracle IRM status information using either of two HTTP methods: HTTP POST or HTTP GET.

8.3.1 Using the HTTP POST Method

The developer will receive a form with an input field called desktop.state. This input will be the XML document that Oracle IRM Desktop posted to the web server where Oracle IRM Server resides. The XML document can be parsed by the custom online status page and appropriate page content built.

Note:

The content of the XML document is described in the JavaDoc for DesktopState, in the Oracle IRM Server Java API Reference.

The HTTP POST method sends all of the available Oracle IRM state information as a form to the configured URL. The advantage is that all of the Oracle IRM state information is available without having to consider the size of the URL. JavaScript must be available on the client computer.

The page parameter is passed as part of the URL. So:

http://some.example.com/status

will result in a post to:

http://some.example.com/status?page=LICENSE_EXPIRED

The Oracle IRM state information is provided as XML, with the relevant information picked out by the developer of the custom online status page. The page parameter is still sent as part of the URL query string, because this is how it is received from Oracle IRM Desktop.

See Example 8-1, "Desktop State in XML Form".

8.3.2 Using the HTTP GET Method

The developer will need to choose which parameters are needed to build an appropriate status page for the user. The page will then need to be developed and a URI with the required parameters configured on the web server where Oracle IRM Server resides.

Note:

The parameters that are available are all content attributes and the built-in parameters are listed in the JavaDoc for StatusPageOperations, in the Oracle IRM Server Java API Reference. The JavaDoc entry for the populateRedirectionURI method of StatusPageOperations contains details of how the URI is populated.

When using the HTTP GET method, all of the state information from Oracle IRM Desktop must be encoded in the query string of the URL that is to serve the custom page. To avoid overly long query strings containing information that is not required by the custom page, only the configured URL acts as a template for the URL that is used.

For example, consider a status page that is concerned only with the type of status page requested and the classification name. If the page is to be served by a page at http://some.example.com/statusPage then the URL could be configured as below:

http://some.example.com/statusPage?page=&irm-classification-name=

When the query is for a classification called 'Top Secret' and where a license has expired, the request would be populated as below:

http://some.example.com/statusPage?page=LICENSE_EXPIRED=&irm-classification-name=Top+Secret

The parameters can be chosen from a list of built-in parameters, and from all of the content attributes supported by the server. In the above example, page is a built-in parameter and irm-classification-name is a content attribute.

Note:

You can design the query string to contain other parameters. Parameters that have already been populated by Oracle IRM and parameters not recognized by Oracle IRM will be left untouched.

The maximum size of URL that can be processed by Microsoft Internet Explorer is 2048 characters.