How can I make meaningful books marks for a LANSA for the Web site?

Question:

We have developed a Web site with LANSA for the Web (www.irobotstore.com), but bookmarks to the pages are generating a "PAGE NOT FOUND" error when clicked. (The URL is: http://www.irobotstore.com/CGI-BIN/LANSAWEB?WEBEVENT+L37833F1B7EB5C8B87918352+JGW+ENG)

Answer:

Browser bookmarks/favorites were really designed for static Web sites, where yours is dynamic. As you might expect, pages generated dynamically cannot be bookmarked in the same way as static pages.

However, there is something you can do...

1. Use the LANSA BIF (Built-in Function) called WEB_STATIC_PAGE to create a static html page, and save it to IFS on the iSeries.
    
2. Modify the html line <Form action="/CGI-BIN/..> to change the part of "WEBEVENT+L37833F1B7EB5C8B87918352+JGW+ENG" to "PROCFUN+<yourProcess>+<yourFunction>+JGW+ENG"
    
3. Add a button/link to your pages to allow users to add the page to their favorites, instead of using the browser's feature.

One of our customers actually took this approach for an entire section of their site because bookmarks were so critical to their users. In their case, they had a night-end job that created many public pages (e.g. pages from a product catalog) that could be bookmarked. Although the pages became static, they were automatically updated nightly to ensure that the prices, inventory, descriptions and photos were not older than a day.

This approach is rarely needed, as most Web-users understand that bookmarks don't work for dynamic applications and the benefits of a dynamic Web-application greatly outweigh the loss of browser bookmarks.