8.4

PReS Workflow can serve both static and dynamic resources to a web browser, however it is not meant to
be used as a fully featured web server, as it is not built for responsiveness nor guaranteed uptime. It is much
better to have a common web server (for example, IISor Apache)to serve your contents and to have PReS
Workflow available only to process things only it can do.
Note
You can control access to the PReS Workflow Tools HTTP Server via the Access Manager.
Important Configuration, Setup and Options
Before starting to work with HTTPworkflows, there are few key points to keep in mind in terms of
configuration. First of all, the following options are available in PReS Workflow Preference screen, under the
HTTPServer Input 1 and HTTPServer Input 2 sections:
l Port (default value:8080 recommended):The port number is the one in which a browser needs to
make a request to PReS Workflow. By default in most web server, port 80 is used and, when this is the
case, it is not necessary to include it. For example, if Itype http://www.objectiflune.com/ in my browser,
it is actually accessing the address http://www.objectiflune.com:80/ , but port 80 is always hidden. The
reason port 8080 is used by default is to prevent any interference with existing web servers installed or
activated on the same server as PReS Workflow.
l Time-out(seconds):This determines how long the HTTPServer service will wait for the process to
finish, before returning a time out error back to the client browser. This means that if a process takes
more than 120 seconds (by default)to complete, the browser will time out. While you can change this
value, it is recommended to always keep your processing to a minimum, since both browsers and
users generally frown upon being stopped for more than a minute, unless they are well aware of this
processing time (and even then...)
l Enable server for SSLrequests:This enables secure communication between the browser and the
server via HTTPS. By enabling this option, you will need to provide for the proper certificates, key and
password. While this configuration is beyond the scope of this document, there are plenty of resources
on the Internet to explain these systems.
l Serve HTTPresources:This is where you enable static resources in PReS Workflow. When
enabling this option, the HTTPserver will always look in the Resource Folder for files requested
inside of the Resource action name as a folder. This means that, if your Resource folder is
c:\PReS\http and your Resource action name is static, pointing your browser to
http://127.0.0.1:8080/static/css/style.css will immediately load and return the file
c:\PReS\http\css\style.css . This does not require any process to work - everything is
handled directly by the HTTPServer Input and files are returned immediately. This feature is very