SSI : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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SSI

Server Side Includes. A technique that makes it much easier to maintain boilerplate text that appears in many different web pages.

With the Apache server, if you turn server side includes on, and name your documents contain the include as *.shtml instead of *.html you can embed code like this in your HTML:
```

```
On an NT server, the filename of the document containing the include needs to be *.stm instead of *.htm. The syntax is nearly identical:
```

```
On Novell you use the standard *.html. You could use either of the above two methods.

Essentially the difference is in the assumptions that each system makes as to what the root level is. On the UNIX system if you use "file=" it starts at the root of the system’s filesystem, in NT it starts at the root of the logical server’s filesystem. On Novell, it starts at the current directory.

Here is a list of things you might say in SSI, and what they would generate when used in this document, using the Novell Server my ISP has. If you are viewing this document locally, you won’t see any effects. You need to be viewing through an SSI server to see the orange SSI-generated material.

SSI Embedded Command	Visible Effect	Purpose
<!--#COUNT FILE="jgloss.cnt"-->	[an error occurred while processing this directive]	hit counter, stored in filename specified. It does not directly measure hits to the jgloss.* files, rather it is incremented every time it is displayed. To work properly you must display the count in the html file being measured and nowhere else. This does not work on Apache. Instead you need something like this: <!--#exec cgi="/perl/count.pl"--> You have to write a perl count.pl script for your server.
<!--#CONFIG TIMEFMT="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"-->		configures the format of SSI timestamps to ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm
<!--#FLASTMOD FILE="jgloss.html"-->	2009-01-09 18:02	display date given file was last modified. The given file reference must not start with ..
<!--#FSIZE FILE="jglosss.html"-->	32K	display the size of the given file.
<!--#ECHO VAR="DOCUMENT_NAME"-->	ssi.html	The document file name
<!--#ECHO VAR="DOCUMENT_URI"-->	/jgloss/ssi.html	The document Universal Resource Identifier (the path)
<!--#ECHO VAR="DATE_LOCAL"-->	2009-01-09 18:08	The current date and time
<!--#ECHO VAR="DATE_GMT"-->	2009-01-10 02:08	The current Greenwich Mean Time date and time
<!--#ECHO VAR="LAST_MODIFIED"-->	2009-01-01 00:24	The date and time the document was last modified.
<!--#ECHO VAR="REMOTE_ADDR"-->	38.103.63.62	The IP address of the user requesting the document
<!--#ECHO VAR="SERVER_SOFTWARE"-->	Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 Ð±°±MMOCØ´´BMOC•¯o¯ DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8	The name and version of the Web server software
<!--#ECHO VAR="SERVER_NAME"-->	www.mindprod.com	The local hostname of the Web Server
<!--#ECHO VAR="SERVER_PORT"-->	80	The TCP port on which the Web server is listening for HTTP requests (the default is 80)
<!--#ECHO VAR="REMOTE_HOST"-->	(none)	The hostname of the computer requesting the document. Needs slow reverse DNS, so usually turned off.
<!--#ECHO VAR="AUTH_TYPE"-->	(none)	The method used to authenticate user requests.
<!--#ECHO VAR="HTTP_USER_AGENT"-->	CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)	The name of the browser requesting the document

FreeMarker
HTML
HTML static macros
JSP

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