FMP and IIS setup problems

[Tokyo-B]

I am having difficulty setting up FMP 5 Unlimited on IIS 5 and would really appreciate some help. One of the main reasons for having difficulty is that FMP is not two-byte enabled so I have to use the Japanese version. This means that all the manuals etc., are in Japanese too. Bit too much to read and comprehend, so with excuses out of the way, here is our scenario followed by my questions:

Scenario:

We have a Win2k server with IIS 5 and FMP v5 Unlimited. In the FMP box there are two CD's. One is FMP v5, the other a Web Connector for IIS.

Our IIS server is set with one IP address for two domains using host headers.

"Domain-English"

"Domain-Japanese"

Both domains/websites share a common on-line FMP db. This means that although the HTML on both sites that 'front' the database is in Japanese and English respectively, the actual database that accepts the data entry 'behind' these pages is exactly the same one.

The structure we used on the Mac under Webstar was quite simple: In the FMP Application Folder is a folder called WEB. In this Folder was the on-line FMP database, the index.html file for the English site and all the subfolders of this site such as images etc.

The Japanese website was a complete mirror of the English site structurally with the very important exception that the 'parent' folder was called 'j' and was INSIDE the WEB folder. This means that the Japanese index.html file was one directory below the English index.html file but had the same name.

The reason for this was that if we needed to redo the web site, we could do it in English or Japanese first and then just translates the other language without having to change the names of images or pages etc.

Under Webstar, we had no problems with this. Moving over to IIS 5 has cause a few problems. Here they are.

Problems under IIS 5:

Using the directory structure as described above, every time we switched from the English to the Japanese page, the pages text would change to Japanese usual, but the English graphics would load... This is because IIS or FMP (?) is looking in the IMAGES folder, and since both the Japanese and English images folders have same name then I guess the upper directory is being accessed.

Now, to correct this we tried two different way:

1) We made a duplicate 'j' folder and its contents and stored it outside the WEB folder So two 'j' folders now. One outside the WEB folder and one inside the WEB folder as a subfolder of the English site. This folder outside of the WEB folder was pointed to under IIS as the Japanese website HOME DIRECTORY. When the HTML page with the FMP form on was selected in either Japanese or English, the page the user saw would change to the correct one and the URL would have the port 591 added to it. This caused no problems but does not seem the best way to resolve the problem so we tried another 'cleaner way.

2) In the FMP application folder we made two folders.

Folder 'english'

Folder 'japanese'

These contained identical sites in structure and layout with the exception of languages on the pages. The WEB folder one directory below these two folders contained a new file called 'index.html' and within this page pointers to the 'index.html' of the respective Japanese and English pages/sites.

Unfortunately, we cannot get this to work, so now for some questions:

1) What is the purpose of the IIS Web connector CD. (I cannot read the Japanese manual well enough to understand its purpose. Too much technical Japanese....)

1.1) How do I use it on a single server?

2) Do we have to keep all of our web sites containing databases in the WEB folder?

3) Is there 'Best Practises' guide anywhere for setting up IIS and FMP?

4) Where or what is the ideal structure for setting up a system like the one described above? That is, what is the ideal workable structure for having two different web sites share the same FMP db?

I hope that this problem provides useful insight to the kind of problems one can face when Migrating from Mac to Win, and really appreciate feedback on this.

Best regards,

Bill