Vinci Part #6 - HTTP Access to DA Schemas via the Browser

As what i’d consider a minor new feature, functionality has been added to the base RO/.NET library to allow service implementations to provide their custom HTML (or whatever) front end when being accessed by the browser, to extend the Welcome pages introduced in v4.

In v4, the RO servers provide a standard HTML page to be shown when the url is accessed in the browser, and a few additional urls are provided as well, to get access to the HTML Documentation for the library, as well as RODL or WSDL files.

For v5 we have expanded that, so any service can now provide custom logic to display a web page (or send back any other information, under a service-specific. Possible uses include sending back some HTML that provides a human-readable status of the service (where applicable), or any custom info or data you can think of.

The first service implementation to leverage this is the standard DA/.NET service implementation, which now provides access to viewing and inspecting the XML schema via the web browser simply by navigating to / on your server. This makes it really easy to have a quick look at your server and make sure it’s serving the latest version if your schema, for example.

Of course this feature is optional, and can be disabled by setting the AllowHttpSchemaAccess or AllowSchemaAccess property on the service module to false.