5.1. Integration with an Existing User Profiles System

RealChat can be easily integrated with any user profile, or membership, system. There is a set of parameters which allow you to pass additional information from a user profile database to a client applet. You pass these parameters by using dynamically generated HTML code. You can use any server-parsed HTML tools, such as ASP, PHP, Perl, or whatever you like.

Tip: The easiest way to do this is to use any of your existing site login scripts as a template, and modify it, so, after a successful login, the script dynamically generates the applet page.

In the following example, parameters have been added to pass the user's nickname, real name, age, and favorite drink. The user is also prohibited from changing his/her profile once logged in.

There is detailed explanation for each parameter in the Configuration Directives Reference section.

Note: If you are integrating RealChat with a membership database, it is good to set the ExternalClientHost server directive in order to prevent people from storing the HTML source locally and calling the Java applet with fake user data.

<applet
  codebase = "."
  archive  = "RealChat.jar"
  code     = "rcs.client.RealChatClient.class"
  name     = "ChatClient"
  width    = "300"
  height   = "100"
  MAYSCRIPT>

  <param name="nick" value="BadJohn">

  <param name="pValue1" value="John Doe">
  <param name="pValue2" value="35">

  <param name="pLabel3" value="Favorite drink:">
  <param name="pValue3" value="beer">

  <param name="canChangeProfile" value="no">

</applet>