LiveCycle® Data Services Developer's Guide

Administering Data Services Applications > Deploying Flex Applications > Deployment checklist

Deployment checklist

This section contains a checklist of common system configuration issues that customers have found when deploying Flex applications for production. It also contains troubleshooting tips to diagnose common deployment problems.

Subtopics

Types of network access

Deployed Flex applications typically make several types of requests to services within your firewall, as the following example shows:

Most of the deployment issues that customers report are related to network security and routing, and fall into one of the following scenarios:

1. Direct access to resources on a web server, such as image files. In the preceding example, the client directly accesses resources on webserver.example.com.
2. Direct access to resources on your application server. In the preceding example, the client directly accesses resources on appserver.example.com. Ensure that deployed Flex applications can access the appropriate servers.
3. Web services requests through a proxy. A proxy redirects a request to the server that handles the web service. The proxy server can be the LiveCycle Data Services proxy server or your own proxy server. In the preceding example, the client accesses a resource on appserver.example.com, but that request is redirected to finance.example.com. Ensure that you configure the proxy server correctly so that deployed Flex applications can access your web services, or other data services, through the proxy.
4. Direct access of a web service. In the preceding example, the client directly accesses a service on finance.example.com. If a deployed Flex application directly accesses web services, or other data services, ensure that access is allowed.

Step 1. Create a list of server-side resources

Before you start testing your network configuration, make a list of the IP addresses and DNS names of all the servers that a Flex application might access. A Flex application might directly access these servers, for example by using a web service, or another server might access them as part of handling a redirected request.

Enter the information about your servers in the following table:

LiveCycle Data Services includes a web service proxy. Enter information about the server hosting the LiveCycle Data Services web service proxy:

Enter information about your web services or any other services accessible from a deployed Flex application:

Step 2. Verify access from server to server inside your firewall

In some cases, an external request to one server can be redirected to another server behind your firewall. A redirected request can occur for a request to a web service or to any file, depending on the system configuration. Where it is necessary, ensure that your servers can communicate with each other so that a redirected request can be properly handled.

To determine if one server, called Server A in this example, can communicate with another server, called Server B, create a temporary file called temp.htm on Server A in its web root directory. Then, log in to Server B and ensure that it can access temp.htm on Server A. Try to access the file by using Server A's DNS name and also its IP address.

Servers can have multiple NIC cards or multiple IP addresses. Ensure that each server can communicate with all of the IP addresses on your other servers.

Also, log in to the server that hosts your web service proxy to make sure that it can access all web services on all other servers. LiveCycle Data Services includes a web service proxy, so log in to the server that hosts LiveCycle Data Services. If your system includes another web service proxy, log in to that server also. You can test the web service proxy by making an HTTP request to the WSDL file for each web service. In the previous example, log in to appserver.example.com and ensure that it can access the WSDL files on finance.example.com.

If any server cannot access the other servers in your system, an external request from a Flex application might also fail. For more information, contact your system administrator.

Step 3. Verify access to your servers from outside the firewall

Some servers might have to be accessed from outside the firewall to handle HTTP, SOAP, or AMF requests from clients. You can use the following methods to determine if a deployed Flex application can access your servers from outside the firewall:

• On each server that can be accessed from outside the firewall, create a temporary file, such as temp.htm, on the server in its web root directory. From a computer outside the firewall, use a browser to make an HTTP request to the temporary file to ensure that an external computer can access it.

  For example, for a file named temp.htm, try accessing it by using the following URL:

  http://webserver.example.com/server1/temp.htm
  

• From a computer outside the firewall, use a browser to make an HTTP request to the WSDL file for each web service that can be accessed from outside the firewall to ensure that the WSDL file can be accessed.

  For example, try accessing the WSDL file for a web service by using the following URL:

  http://finance.example.com/server1/myWS.wsdl
  

You should be able to access the temp.htm file or the WSDL file on all of your servers from outside the firewall. If these requests fail, contact your IT department to determine why the files cannot be accessed.

Step 4. Configure the proxy server

In Step 3. Verify access to your servers from outside the firewall, you ensure that you can directly access your servers and server resources from outside the firewall. When you use the LiveCycle Data Services proxy or your own proxy server to handle requests to data services, you also must ensure that you can access the data services from a deployed Flex application through the proxy.

You typically configure a proxy server with a list of URLs to which the administrator gives access to the proxy. Only the URLs that are allowed by the administrator can pass through the proxy.

With LiveCycle Data Services, you use the configuration files to configure the list of accessible URLs. For another type of proxy server, a different configuration mechanism might be in place. After you configure your proxy server, ensure that the deployed Flex application can access web services and other server-side resources as necessary.

For more information on configuring LiveCycle Data Services, see Configuring Data Management on the Server.

Step 5. Create a cross-domain policy file

Your system might be configured to allow a Flex application to directly access server-side resources on different domains or different computers without going through a proxy. These operations fail under the following conditions:

• When the Flex application's SWF file references a URL, and that URL is outside the exact domain of the SWF file that makes the  request
• When the Flex application's SWF file references an HTTPS URL, and the SWF file that makes the request is not served over HTTPS

To make a data service or asset available to SWF files in different domains or on different computers, use a crossdomain policy file on the server that hosts the data service or asset. A cross-domain policy file is an XML file that provides a way for the server to indicate that its data services and assets are available to SWF files served from certain domains, or from all domains. Any SWF file that is served from a domain specified by the server's policy file is permitted to access a data service or asset from that server. By default, place the crossdomain.xml at the root directory of the server that is serving the data.

For more information on using a cross-domain policy file, see Using cross-domain policy files.

LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.5

Send me an e-mail when comments are added to this page | Comment Report

Current page: http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/programmer/lcds/deployingoverview_7.html

Add Comment