8.5
Table Of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Welcome to PlanetPress Workflow 8.5
- System Requirements
- Basics
- Features
- The Nature of PlanetPress Workflow
- About Branches and Conditions
- Configuration Components
- Connect Resources
- About Data
- About Documents
- Debugging and Error Handling
- The Plug-in Bar
- About Printing
- About Processes and Subprocesses
- Using Scripts
- Special Workflow Types
- About Tasks
- Task Properties
- Variable Properties
- Working With Variables
- About Configurations
- About Related Programs and Services
- The Interface
- Copyright Information
- Legal Notices and Acknowledgements
l Polling Interval (sec):This option determines how much time the HTTPServer Input waits between
the moment it finishes processing a request and the moment it picks up a new request. This should be
put at 0 in order to process requests as soon as possible, meaning immediately.
And finally, the HTTPServer Input task properties. While these are described in the "HTTP Server Input"
on page202 task properties page, here are a few considerations to keep in mind when using this task:
l The HTTPAction corresponds precisely to the name immediately following the first slash of your
address. That is to say, placing the action myaction here means the process would be triggered by
opening http://127.0.0.1:8080/myaction in your browser.
l The HTTPservice accepts both POSTand GETrequests. Other than the presence of file attachments,
there is little difference in how these are handled. This means that visiting
/myaction?id=12345&q=test would be the same as having a form with two <input> fields
named, respectively, id and q, and submitting them with the information "12345"and "test". In both
cases, this information is located in the XMLenvelope that is the original input file.
l When doing POSTrequests and uploading files, always make sure to include the "multipart"option in
the <form>tag:
<form action="http://127.0.0.1:8080/myaction" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">
Otherwise, file attachments will not be received, only their file names.
l The Mime Type option is better left at Auto-Detect unless the process requires it to be forced to a
specific type. This means that if a process can either return a PDF when successful or an HTMLpage
with an error message, it will not attempt to send an HTML with a PDFmime type (which, obviously,
would cause confusion).
l
There is no HTTPServer Output task (see below on how to end your process)
Request/Process/Response cycle
Once a process using the HTTPServer Input task is created, it is important to understand the cycle that is
triggered when such a process runs. Note that this is the process when the default HTTPServer Input task
options are used (more on how that behavior changes later):
1. A request is received by the HTTPservice.
2. This request is converted into an XMLrequest file along with one or more attachments when present.
3. The XMLrequest file and attachments are saved in a local folder, if the HTTPAction is a valid one
(otherwise, the files are deleted).
4. The HTTPservice keeps the request from the client open (it does not yet respond ot it), and waits.