Configuring Add-in proxies
In an enterprise environment, it is often not the case that MindLink Anywhere and any Client Add-ins will be served from the same actual machine. Hence, they will be served from different domains/ports and so Client Add-in/MindLink Anywhere communication will be forbidden.
The use of a reverse-proxy is therefore required to mux requests to MindLink Anywhere and to any configured Client Add-ins to the same domain. This can be achieved by configuring the reverse-proxy with forwarding rules based on the relative-path of the incoming HTTP request. The reverse-proxy is not a component of MindLink Anywhere and must be sourced from a third-party vendor.
Re-write rules
It may also be the case that a Client Add-in's URL, as loaded by Group Chat Console clients, is not that which is exposed by the MindLink Anywhere reverse-proxy. In this case, the Add-in should be configured using the Group Chat MindLink Management Center as the URL that the Group Chat Console should load. MindLink Anywhere should then be configured using the Add-in re-write rules configuration key, to convert the Add-ins URL into the URL that the reverse-proxy exposes it as.
The Add-in re-write rules configuration setting is a set of key/value pairs. The "key" is a regular expression to test any Client Add-in URLs against. If the regex matches, the Client Add-in URL is transformed using the "value" string. The value string supports regex style group placeholders (e.g. $1) to re-use elements of the original matched URL.
For instance: to re-write an internal Client Add-in URL of:
- http://addins.MindLink.net/ to the external address of http://MindLink Anywhere.MindLink.net/addins/
the regular expression would be http://addins.MindLink.net/(.*), and the replacement would be http://MindLink Anywhere.MindLink.net/addins/$1 In the MindLink Management Center, this would be typed in the add in re write rules config box as:
- http://addins.MindLink.net/(.*), http://MindLink Anywhere.MindLink.net/addins/$1;
Note that the literal special characters in the regular expression "key" string are escaped with a backslash.
An example Client Add-in configuration:
Example proxy and MindLink Anywhere configuration
A check box in the management center can be used to enable/disable Client Add-in support across the whole system in all chat rooms, if needed.