Until now, we have been creating "public pages" only. We understand by public pages every page that everybody can access without any limitation. However, we sometimes need to restrict the access to certain users. In order to do this, we need to create a site that grant access to pages based on a user name and password combination. For this kind of sites we will refer from now on as "Private sites".

Defining a private site

In order to define a private site, follow these steps:

1. Open the DBSP Configuration Tool (Start->Programs->DBSP->DBSP Configuration Tool).

2. Click on the "Sites" tab. The next screen should be displayed:

3. In this screen are listed all the sites included in the selected configuration file. This file must be located in the web server machine in order to be properly read (DBSP Installation dir\bin).

4. Create a new site by pressing the "New" button. The next screen should be displayed:

5. Type a name for the new site on the name field.

6. Type the root directory for the site in the root dir field or press the browse button (…) and select the proper directory.

7. Type in the "security key" field the key with all the sensible information will be encrypted (login info, session info, etc). This key must be exactly 16 characters long.

8. Type in "default login page" the page that will be displayed by default when a private page is requested and an authenticated session does not exist. This pages must be contained in a public directory within the site (see the next step).

9. In the lower pane of the screen, all the public subdirectories for this site are listed. This means that the files contained in directories of this list will not be restricted to a valid session. This feature is necessary because some pages of the site need to be public (like the login page for instance). Press the "Add" button and select all the directories that you want to have this property.

10. Press the "Ok" button to complete the process.

11. Save your changes and RESTART YOUR WEB SERVER for changes to take effect!

Note: In every DBSP site is necessary at least one public directory that contains the login page. The login page can not be private. In other case, an exception is raised.

Note: You can define the root site as public and create a default page inside it with the login functionality. Notice that by making the root directory public you are not defining all its subdirectories public. The public property is not recursive.

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