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InterAction® Administrator Answer Center

Configure Map and Weather Links

  • Updated

When displaying a contact’s addresses in view contact page, the Web Client includes links for going to a map or weather report for the address. By default, these links go to Yahoo! Maps and weather.com, respectively. The links pass along the contact’s address information so that the third-party site can automatically search for the map or weather.

Links to Weather Reports and Maps

[A] Links to Yahoo! Maps and weather.com.

Because these links go to third-party Web sites, it is always possible for them to stop working if the third-party site changes the format for their URLs. To handle this, InterAction provides a way to change the URLs used for these links. You change this by editing the InterActionWebPage.cfg configuration file. The file is located in the etc directory of your Application Server install.

The InterActionWebPage.cfg file contains two settings:

  • streetMapProviderURL
  • weatherProviderURL

When setting these URLs, you need to pass information about the current contact to the other Web site. You can do so by using any of the following variables in the Web site address:

  • $$(streetAddress)
  • $$(city)
  • $$(state)
  • $$(postalCode)
  • $$(country)
  • $$(countryAbbrev)
  • $$(contactId)
  • $$(accountName)

The information you need to include in the URL depends on the Web site you are using. For example, the default map provider URL passes along the contact’s street address, zip/postal code, and country abbreviation in the format that maps.yahoo.com expects. Note that this would be entered all on one line:

streetMapProviderURL = http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap

&addr=$$(streetAddress)&csz=$$(postalCode)&Country=$$(countryAbbrev)

The default weather provider URL passes just the zip/postal code to www.weather.com:

weatherProviderURL = http://www.weather.com/weather/local/$$(postalCode)

Note the following rules for both streetMapProviderURL and weatherProviderURL:

  • If the setting is not provided or is blank, the corresponding link will not appear in the Web Client. Therefore, you can remove the link by deleting or commenting out the corresponding setting (not recommended).
  • The URL must begin with http:// to be valid. If the URL is invalid, the corresponding link will not appear in the Web Client.

Change the Map or Weather Provider URL

  1. On your InterAction Application Server machine, locate the etc directory. In a typical installation, this is normally the following:

    C:\Program Files\LexisNexis\InterAction\AppServer\iahome\etc

  2. Open the file called InterActionWebPage.cfg in a text editor.
  3. Locate the streetMapProviderURL or weatherProviderURL variable.
  4. Change the value to the URL you want. You can use variables within the URL to pass InterAction information.
    • $$(streetAddress)
    • $$(city)
    • $$(state)
    • $$(postalCode)
    • $$(country)
    • $$(countryAbbrev)
    • $$(contactId)
    • $$(accountName)
  5. Save the InterActionWebPage.cfg file.
  6. The new URL will be used the next time Application Server reloads the cache.