Overview of Graphical User Interface

1. Overview of the purpose and functionality of the GUI

The WebMDS GUI is a web-based interface for browsing formatted XML data, such as the results of resource property queries on a grid service.

2. Command and options

WebMDS can be accessed using any web browser. In a default WebMDS installation, the URL http://hostname:port/webmds corresponds to the top-level WebMDS web page. This page includes a link to a WebMDS invocation that provides summary information (with links to detailed information) about a locally-running MDS Index server. It also contains a olink to a page of sample web forms demonstrating other uses of WebMDS.

3. Customizing the web forms used to access WebMDS

The WebMDS servlet is located at http://your-tomcat-host:your-tomcat-port/webmds/webmds. It takes the following arguments:

Table 1. Form arguments used by WebMDS

infoThe name of the XML source that will be used to collect the raw XML data. XML sources are defined by files in $GLOBUS_LOCATION/lib/webmds/conf. This argument must be specified.
xslThe name of the XML source that will provide the XSL transform. XML sources are defined by files in $GLOBUS_LOCATION/lib/webmds/conf. If this argument is not specified, the WebMDS servlet will display raw, untransformed XML.
xmlSource.info_name.param.source_specific_options

Any additional options recognized by the info_name XML source (info_name must be the value of the info argument for this request). Source-specific options are discussed in the next section.

xmlSource.xsl_name.param.source_specific_options

Any additional options recognized by the xsl_name XML source (xsl_name must be the value of the xsl argument for this request). Source-specific options are discussed in the next section.

4. Limitations

Error conditions (such as typographical errors in resource property names) are presented as stack traces, rather than user-friendly error messages.