Private Spatial Connections

In AssetWise CONNECT Edition Asset Lifecycle Information Management Transportation, the map on the client side web browser makes requests to the WMS service to get map layer images. However, some organizations may want to put their WMS service in the internal network for security reasons. Since the internal WMS services are not accessible outside of their network, AssetWise provides a gateway to forward the request from public domain to the internal server. This is accomplished by way of "Private" connection: If a WMS service is inside the corporate intranet, the user must use prefix the spatial connection name with "PRIVATE_" , in AssetWise Director. For any WMS layers which use the private spatial connection, the requests are routed to the MSG, and MSG forwards the requests to the internal WMS service.

On the web browser side, prior to sending out a request for a WMS layer, the web application checks the spatial connection for this layer and if the spatial connection is a private one, it sends the request to the MSG, otherwise it sends the request directly to the public map server.

MSG serves as a gateway that sits between the public internal and private intranet. When MSG receives the request from the web browser, it verifies if the user has access permission for the required layer. If authorized, it forwards the request to the internal WMS service and then returns the result back to the client.

Note: MSG needs spatial layers information to do the authorization. To be effective, the first time that it handles the client’s request, it makes requests to WSG to get the spatial layers information which includes who can access what layers. It then caches the data for future use.

The following diagram depicts the how spatial connection requests work:

To set up a private connection, see "Configuring a Private Spatial Connection" in the AssetWise CONNECT Edition Implementation Guide.