Example transparent path junction

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The following example uses the pdadmin command (entered as one line) to create a transparent path junction (/docs) to the back-end server pubs.ibm.com:

pdadmin> server task web1-webseald-www.cruz.com create -t tcp -x 
-h pubs.ibm.com /docs

After a client request for a back-end resource is made (via the WebSEAL proxy server), a response page is returned from pubs.ibm.com containing the following link (URL) in the HTML of that page:

http://pubs.ibm.com/docs/readme.html

WebSEAL's standard filtering mechanism for junctions parses the HTML in the response page and modifies this link by changing the original absolute expression of the URL to a server-relative expression. However, the path is not filtered, because this is a transparent path junction (-x). This is the link as it now appears to the user:

/docs/readme.html

Note: If rewrite-absolute-with-absolute was set to "yes", the link would appear as:

http://www.cruz.com/docs/readme.html

See Configuring the rewrite-absolute-with-absolute option.

Now the user clicks the link to access the back-end resource (readme.html).

The portion of the URL representing the junction name (/docs) is recognized by WebSEAL as associated with the /docs subdirectory on the back-end server, pubs.ibm.com.

As a conclusion to the example, WebSEAL successfully locates the resource at:

http://pubs.ibm.com/docs/readme.html

Some benefits of transparent path junctions include:

Several different transparent path junctions to the same back-end server can be created to point to different regions (subdirectories) of that server.
Each individual transparent path junction can handle a different authentication requirement and ACL control.