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HTTPS tips

The following activities are commonly associated with setting up and troubleshooting http and https services.

Https and mixed-content

Your Live instance is configured as as a https service:

  • Mind that any https website will block embedded http content (mixed content).

    This may prevent loading of map services which are published as http.

If the use of http is still quite common in your community, you could consider to request to publish your service also as http. When users want to login, we will redirect them to https.

Custom https certificate

Your Live instance comes with a default https certificate provided by GeoCat. If you want to use an alternative certificate signed by your organization, contact support.

We experienced that a default openJDK Java installation allows only a subset of the commonly accepted certificates. This causes problems if your Live instance is making a request to a source which is not trusted by Java.

Live services generate requests to external services while harvesting remote content, retrieve capabilities, SLD or XSD information. In such a case contact support and they will add the requested certificate to the java environment of your live service.

Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) allows browsers to embed remote content, for example WMS services:

  • CORS is enabled on all your Live services webservices.

    Contact support if you wish to disable CORS for any of your services

In the geospatial domain the adoption of CORS is unfortunately still low.

  • Recommend data providers in your community to enable CORS on their data services.

  • If your portal wishes to display a web services for which CORS is not configured, you have an option to enable a webproxy on your Live service.

    The Catalogue Map requests will then run via your Live instance.

    Note that you need to "whitelist" (configure) the remote servers for which you want the webproxy to be enabled.

Search Engine Optimization

Register your portal at popular search engines such as Google and Bing. Search engines require to identify yourself as owner of the service by placing an identification file on the server. Share this file with support@geocat.net and we'll place it at the proper location.

Once registered you can follow the search and crawl behavior of the search engine. Evaluate the search behavior periodically and learn from the statistics. A search engine will report popular keywords, broken links, errors in structured data, etc.

Consider to register the catalogue sitemap, eg http://localhost:8080/geonetwork/srv/eng/portal.sitemap, in the search console to increase crawling speed.