Windchill System Administrator's Guide

Choosing Host Names
• Relative HREFs to static resources.
• Absolute HREFs to other dynamically generated pages.
Most Windchill HTML pages are generated from HTML template files.
Templates are allowed to contain HREFs to other static resources (such as images,
backgrounds, and style sheets), without requiring the links to be generated by
script calls if the document base is specified as the root of the Windchill virtual
directory. To make sure the template’s contents are not tightly coupled with the
request URL, the tag is dynamically generated using a script code. This
allows a response template to be shared by many requests that may have a variable
number of PATH_INFO elements. Links to other dynamically generated pages
(via servlets) are also generated by script calls and product-absolute HREFs.
Most dynamically generated HREFs share some URL components (for example,
protocol, host, port, and path prefix) with the base URI of the pages containing
them. It should be possible for Windchill to generate relative HREFs into the
pages. However, most Windchill code currently uses java.net.URL objects
internally when generating HREFs, and there is no such thing as a relative
java.net.URL object. Thus, it is currently not possible to configure Windchill to
generate all HREFs as relative links. If it were possible, it would still not be
advisable to access a Windchill system using more than one base URL, such as
using one URL for internal users and another for external users accessing through
a reuse proxy. Although this might not result in changes to the internal system's
configuration, host names and URLs are not used only in HTTP requests and
responses. Host names also appear in RMI stubs, and URLs also appear in HTML
e-mail.
Enterprise deployments, reverse proxy configuration, in particular, should use
single, application-specific host name aliases to enable controlling network
connectivity through name resolution, as described in the next section.
A Windchill system is an enterprise resource, much like a mail server, directory,
or corporate intranet Web server. As such, it is good practice to give the system its
own host name alias. This allows the system to move to different hosts or even to
different networks, without affecting user bookmarks or e-mail links that already
exist. For example, suppose the ACME company has used Windchill to
implement an engineering change management system, with the code name
ECMS. A DNS alias of ecms.acme.com should be set up, rather than using a
specific host name, such as server12.east.acme.com.
By configuring all Windchill host name and URL properties to use the desired
alias, the IT department can control how this name is resolved to an IP address,
both internally and externally.
• From within the corporate intranet, the name can resolve directly to an
internal server on a private internal network.
Windchill Considerations for Security Infrastructures B-7