WASD Hypertext Services - Technical Overview

The Update facility allows Web documents and file environments to be administered from a standard browser.  This capability is available to Web administrator and user alike.  Availability and capability depends on the authorization environment within the server. 

It should be stressed that this is not designed as a full hypertext administration or authoring tool, and for document preparation relies on the editing capabilities of the <TEXTAREA> widget of the user's browser.  It does however, allow ad-hoc changes to be made to documents fairly easily, as well as allowing documents to be deleted, and directories to be created and deleted. 

Consult the current Update documentation for usage detail.

Here is an example of the interface (access may have been denied).

UPDate Navigation Graphic   UPDate Edit Graphic

If SSL is in use (see 14 - Secure Sockets Layer) then username/password privacy of the authorization environment is inherently secured via the encrypted communications.  To restrict web update functionality to this secure environment add the following to the HTTPD$MAP configuration file:

  /upd/*  "403 Access denied."  ![sc:https]

Of course, the user must have write (POST/PUT) access to the document or area on the server (i.e. the path) and the server account have file system permission to write into the parent directory. 

The server will report "Insufficient privilege or object protection violation ... /path/document" if it does not have file system permission to write into a directory. 

Also see 12.10 - Controlling Server Write Access for information on write access control for the server account.