I am trying to make React Component where I like to display cards like which you see on Facebook or Linked In when you post some link.
You start with fetch() and parse the information from the return HTML, mainly in elements inside the <head>.
However, this is only going to work if the target site has super open CORS headers. Most sites don't, and for those cases you will need a server to do the fetching and perhaps parsing.
Related
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!
We have built a project (Web Application) in React .net core using react in client-side rendering.
We've used react-helmet for dynamically assigning meta tags.
The issue being when the app renders in the browser. The browser gets only the static HTML on initial load which does not include the dynamic meta tags we have set. However on inspecting you get those meta tags under "Elements".
Also, if we use these URL for sharing on any social media, like WhatsApp or Facebook, the URL does not render any metadata as it should.
Tried searching for solutions to our problem, the most obvious answer we came across was to try server-side rendering instead. We get that, but it is not a solution to try out at this juncture when we're ready with app to roll it out.
Others we came across were "react-snap", "react-snapshot", but no luck
with react-snap, it requires to upgrade React's version to 16+, which we did but I guess not all dependencies were upgraded, there was an error saying "
hydrate is not a function
(hydrate concerns the react-dom)
With react-snapshot, we could not find the necessary type definition, which is required in react .net core to function properly
Please guide for the next probable step (except the paid ones like prerender, etc)?
Main goal: Social Applications should render the meta data when we paste/share the URL within them.
Prerender is the only solution.
I used a node dependency called "prerender" -> https://github.com/prerender/prerender
It works enabling a web server wich make http requests. Assigning value to a boolean: window.prerenderReady = true; in your website tells your server when the page is ready to "take the photo" and it returns the Html when so. You need to program an easy script that parses all the site urls and save those html contents to files. Upload them to your server and using .htaccess or similar target the crawlers external-hit-facebook,twitterbot,googlebot, etc.. to show them the prerendered version and 'the real site' to the rest of user-agents.
It worked for me.
The meta tags for Open Graph need to be present in the HTML which is sent back to the client when fetching a URL. Browsers or bots will not wait until the app is rendered on the client side to determine what the metatags are - they will only look at the initially loaded HTML.
If you need the content of your Open Graph metadata to be dynamic (showing different content depending on the URL, device, browser etc.) you need to add something like react-meta-tags into your server code.
There are no type definitions available for any of the react meta tags libraries, but you can add your own. It can be a bit tricky, but check out the official documentation and the templates they have provided to get started.
If you don't need it to be dynamic, you could add the tags into the static parts of the <head>-tag in your index.html.
I had the same issue today. I had two React Web applications that need this. Here is how I solved it:
put your preview image in the public folder
still in public folder, Open index.html, add the line <meta property="og:image" content="preview.png"/>
or <meta property="og:image" content="%PUBLIC_URL%/preview.png"/>.
Go to https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/ to check if it works.
I hope this would help!
I am working on integrating a 2sxc content WebAPI feed into a ReactJS application.
I have managed to get a JSON feed of data into the application, and am in the process of mapping out the data.
I'm wondering what the best practice would be to "resolve" a URL which is coming through as a DNN Page/ Tab ID.
Below I will showcase the various points this is referenced...
First the Setup of the entity / data types...
Then this is an example entry with the data filled out... The page link / URL is set up to point to another internal page on the DNN website:
Finally you can see this data item come through as a JSON feed via the 2sxc API:
What is the best way to convert this piece of data into a URL which can be used in a SPA type application?
There isn't any "server-side" code going on, just reading a JSON feed on the client side...
My initial idea would be to parse this piece of data in JS, to extract the number then use something like this:
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/85/default.aspx
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/default.aspx?tabid=85
I was hoping someone with more experience would be able to suggest a better / cleaner approach.
Thanks in advance
If you were server-side in Razor you'd be doing something like this:
#using DotNetNuke.Common
View List
XXXX = Dnn.Tab.TabID or define a string with the tab id you want
I seem to have a vague memory that I saw somewhere that Daniel (2sxc) has a way to use Globals.NavigateUrl() or similar on the client side, but I have no idea where or if I did see that.
The Default.aspx?tabid=xx format will certainly work, as it's the oldest DNN convention and is still used in fallbacks. The urls aren't nice, but it's ok.
The reason you're seeing this is because the query doesn't perform the automatic lookup with the AsDynamic(...) does for you. There is an endpoint to look them up, but they are not official, so they could change and therefor I don't want to suggest that you use them.
So if you really want a nicer url, you should either see if DNN has a REST API for this, or you could create a small own 2sxc-api endpoint (in the api folder) just to look that up, then using the NavigateURL. Would be cool if you shared your work.
What is the best practice to export or preview page content onClick as pdf/xls in the browser?
From my inexperienced understanding, I have to create an action/function that generates a static page content to pdf. Please correct me if I'm wrong and help me with implementation.
Assuming this is not the File-> Print page function, if you are talking about actually generating a file, there are a couple of libraries out there to do that. That problem is not specific to React.
A good JavaScript library to generate pdfs is pdfmake. I have used it in a project, although I used it in a backend Nodejs server. It may also work in the frontend directly. I suggest you try leaving the pdf generation to the backend though, then you need only download the file after making a request with some data from the frontend.
I am trying to find an accessible file upload method for React that doesn't rely on jQuery (I am not using it) but does rely on Fetch (async).
Everything I've found thus far seems to be drag and drop type components or uses jQuery's $.ajax methods. I feel like there's got to be a way to send a file with other form fields.
The front end is React with vanilla JavaScript. I've got a custom API that sends data to my back end asynchronously with Fetch. My back end uses Multer to gather form data. My form sends with multipart/form-data.
I've tried a few things, including adjusting the headers when sending from React to my back end, but either only the body comes through (no files) or nothing at all comes through.
I could get this to work by directly sending to my Express server, but I don't want to expose my API routes in the HTML, and I'm hoping to avoid the page refresh which would make this form stand out from everything else in my app. I have decided against using jQuery because I am able to do pretty much everything without it and I don't want to add the weight of the library just for the one method.
Accessibility is key (drag and drop components generally aren't accessible for obvious reasons) so I'm hoping to use a standard input file element here.
Thanks to anyone and all in advance.