4D 6.5's new web serving capabilities offer a lot of flexibility in protecting access to your web site. One of the main ways of doing this is to test a name and password in the On Web Authentication method.

Details about how to use this method are provided in the 4D 6.5 Language Reference Manual. Among other things, it says that this method, if it exists, is called every time there is a connection from a web browser to 4D.

You might wonder how to get this method to present a password dialog initially, and to silently accept the connection from the same browser after that. There seems to be no way to tell which case the On Web Connection method is dealing with.

Actually, there is no problem, because the web browser takes care of this for us. The browser automatically requests a name and password on the first connection to 4D, remembers what was entered until the browser is shut down, and invisibly includes it with every connection to 4D.

So to implement password security using On Web Authentication, just test for an appropriate name and password every time, and accept or reject the name and password.