I have built an application using React and .Net Web API. I'm pretty new at all this and without any previous knowledge on meta tags, I am now stuck on trying to implement a Facebook Share Button using dynamic meta tags.
I tried using react-helmet and react-snapshot but Facebook ignores the dynamic tags, and only accepts the url of the page. Now I've heard that it's possibly doable to replace the meta tags using the server side, but I'm not so sure I know how to do that in .Net.
I'm also aware of the option of using a framework such as Next.js, however, being so short on time, I was wondering if there exists a solution that doesn't include migrating.
Is there a way of making this work with the technology I am already using?
If anyone has had this problem before and is willing to help, or just knows the solution, I'd highly appreciate it! Thank you!
Related
I have a complex requirement, where we have an asp.net webforms site we want to try and upgrade in a step by step way. We are considering using React (frontend, with asp.net core backend) for this purpose. The website has an iframe in the centre, and we want to try and replace the old content with the new completely separately hosted React content. This needs to occur after clicking a link on the asp.net webforms page.
I managed to create a ‘Create React app’ website prototype and it was simple to load it into the iframe by linking directly to the React website. I came unstuck when I wanted to try and add an authentication token into the header (oauth2 with openid connect for use with IdentityServer). The only way I could see to do this was to try using javascript to add the header by making an XMLHttpRequest object (or I tried also using the Fetch API) and this partially worked but not everything was correctly loaded.
I see for example an answer here How to embed React App into another website which I assume is the best way to add the website into an iframe.
So, I can’t find much on the internet about dealing with authentication… I guess because asp.net webforms are so old by now, but I assume others have wanted to do something similar before. The question I have, is what would be considered to be the best way to do this? I don’t know if I’m going in completely the wrong direction.
The app
The application was made using ReactJS, React Router Dom, Styled Components and Redux ducks.
The backend we consume is also made by us using Amazon Amplify and GraphQL.
The goal
We need to define the meta tags of one of the application pages so that it is possible to share personalized links to users
in social networks using OpenGraphic meta tags and the like.
The problem
The project was made in ReactJS and ReactJS has only one HTML page as root (/public/index.html), in this way, everything is generated with Javascript in a root tag, and when it arrives in the browser it is transpiled, as we already know. The problem is that the crawlers responsible for understanding the meta tags are not able to understand Javascript and end up not finding the dynamic data that I am defining on the page that I need to share the link on. They understand that there is one html file and only.
Attempts to resolve the issue
1) Define the meta tags in the /public/index.html file itself
This solution doesn't work because the data we are using is dynamic and the index.html file is a static file
2) Using react-helmet
The solution allows meta tags to be defined, but as already mentioned, crawlers don't understand JS. So, despite being on the page, the meta tags do not appear when sharing the link.
3) Using some SSR technology
This is a possible solution, but we were unable to integrate any SSR Framework into React. And it is not feasible to change the base technology of the project. We can't just switch from React to Next, for example, as the project is already complete.
4) Using a small server made with express.js along with the React application to replace the meta tags in index.html with string.replace() simulating something like an SSR
This solution works, but it causes two requests to be made every time the page is accessed, once by express.js and once on the front-end side by React. Due to the number of requests increasing, this solution was discarded. But if necessary, you can do it. In this case it is also necessary to check if Amplify can keep the application and the small server running in the same project.
5) Using react-snap with react-helmet
React-snap allows you to create html snapshots of the pages of a React project based on their routes and links, this added to react-helmet generates a perfect solution for links to be treated well by web crawlers when they are shared. But the solution doesn't work with dynamic routes. For example, /your-route/:id is a dynamic route that expects an id to be fully defined. React-snap gets lost when trying to create a snapshot of a route that only exists when the id is set. Unfortunately, this solution doesn't work.
These were the solutions we used to try to solve the problem, but it was not possible yet. Probably attempt 4 would be the most ideal to solve the problem. But we are looking for the best way that will not generate reworks and future problems. If someone knows a better way to do that, would help us a lot!
I have a generated Zoho CRM webform for Contact us. I need to integrate that form into my react application and submit user inputs. I can get the iframe version, javascript version, and HTML/CSS version of the generated code. I want to know which one is best for the Reactjs PWA application and can we use this directly with react. Can someone help me with this?
I would suggest avoiding iframe altogether. You might find a lot of issues when dealing with cross-domain artifacts and policies. If you want to customize the look and feel of the form, better go ahead with the HTML & CSS version. JavaScript file will be an external dependency. It also would be a hacky / non-react way.
This is more of a general question, hence I'm not including any code.
I've looked at quite a few options for both pdf and html, but haven't figured out a good solution.
I'm trying to take the output of what would be rendered by reactJs in a browser and save it to the hosting server instead of (or as well as) displaying it in the browser.
Specifically I'm generating a report using a pretty standard React functions, styled with css, and want to save that report upon rendering to the server.
The API which I also control is Django based.
I've looked at react-pdf/renderer, react-pdf, pdfkit on the Django side (w/wkhtmltopdf), reactdomserver to generate static html files, but can't quite piece together a solution.
Would love some feedback if anyone's done something like this before.
In an article I read that
React uses server-side rendering.
But in another articles I came across this:
Client-Side-Rendering is a relatively new approach to rendering
websites, and it didn't really become popular until JavaScript
libraries started incorporating it into their style of development.
Some notable examples are Vue.js and React.js
Now Which statement is correct?
When I use create-react-app and run npm start, it seems to me that React uses the Client-Side-Rendering. isn't it?
It’s client side. But React, like some other client side libraries, can be used on the server to prerender it with node, usually for SEO.
Out of the box it renders on the client side.
But, if you have a requirement to render pages on a server, you can achieve this with:
Next.js or
Hypernova or any other tool (there is a bunch of them nowadays!)
Note, that SSR will require a bit more experience than a regular React app.
The main goal of this approach is to allow search engine robots crawl information form web pages(SEO).
create-react-app uses client side rendering by default. There are some tools like next js and gatsby js which pre-render pages on the server side. You can also do Server Side Rendering from scratch.
A few years on from the last answer, it is now quite difficult to implement a client-only React app - serving it on Node is trivial and absolutely what it expects, trying to use it as a client library with other server-side support is more of a challenge and documentation about how to do this is patchy and much of it out of date.