Simulate Access disable feature in Worklight , when worklight server itself is down.

Question

I am trying show end users maintainence window such as "we are down please try later" and disable the application but my problem is what if my worklight server itself is down and not reachable and i cannot use the feature provided by worklight console,

Is there a way i make my app talk to a different server which returns back the below json data when a app is disabled , can i simulate this behaviour is this possible.

json recieved on access disabled in worklight :-

/*-secure-
 {"WL-Authentication-Failure":{"wl_remoteDisableRealm":{"message”:”We are down, Please try again soon","downloadLink":null,"messageType":"BLOCK"}}}*/

Idan Adar Idan Adar · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-24T04:35:57

I have some conceptual problems with this question.

Typically a production environment (simplified) would not consist of a single server serving your end-users... meaning, there would be a cluster of nodes, each node being a Worklight Server, and this cluster would be behind a load balancer that would direct the incoming requests. And so in a situation where a node is down for maintenance like in your scenario there would still be more servers able to serve - there would be no down time.

And thus at this point your suggestion to simulate a Remote Disable by sending it from another(?) Worklight Server seems not so much the correct path to take (it may even be simply wrong). Have you had this second Worklight Server, why wouldn't it just serve the apps business like usual? See again my first paragraph about clustering.

Now lets assume there is still a downtime, that affects all servers. The application's client logic should be able to handle failed connections to the Worklight Server. In such a case you should handle this in the WL.Client.connect()'s onFailure callback function to display a WL.SimpleDialog that looks just like a Remote Disable's dialog... or perhaps via the initOption.js's onConnectionFailure callback.

Bottom line: you cannot simulate the JSON that is sent back for the wl_RemoteDisable realm; it is part of a larger security mechanism.

Additionally though, perhaps a way to better handle maintenance mode on your server is to have the HTTP server return a specific HTTP status code, check for this code and display a proper message based on the returned HTTP status code.

To check for this code in a simple example:
Note: the getStatus method is available starting MobileFirst Platform Foundation 7.0 (formerly "Worklight").

function wlCommonInit(){    
    WL.Client.connect({onSuccess:success, onFailure:failure});
}

function success(response) {
    // ...
}

function failure(response) {
    if (response.getStatus() == "503") {
        // site is down for maintenance - display a proper message.
    } else if ...
}

Simulate Access disable feature in Worklight , when worklight server itself is down.

1 Answers