DOM

Read more about the article Hiding the Scrollbar in HTML in the loklak Media Wall

Hiding the Scrollbar in HTML in the loklak Media Wall

Loklak media wall needs to provide an appealing view to the user. The issue of visibility of scrollbars appeared on the browsers which uses webkit as a browser engine, for example, Google chrome and some others. This issue caused problems like shifting of elements when scrollbars are visible, bad UI. The task was to hide the scrollbars completely from the application while still making overflow of web page resources available by scrolling.

In this blog, I explain how to hide scrollbars from a webpage and still making scrolling available for the user.

Procedure

 

  • Removing scrollbars from the body division: By default, the <body> tag has the style property overflow:auto which makes overflow available automatically if web page resources exceed the current page dimensions. Therefore, to hide scrollbar from the body, we need to hide the overflow using overflow:hidden.

body {
overflow: hidden;
}

 

  • Creating a child wrapper division for the body: Since body now doesn’t provide scrolling available for the web page, we need to create a wrapper division for the web page for which scrolling would be available, however, scrollbars would not be visible. The idea behind this step is that wrapper division would now act as a wrapper for the web page and if there is some overflow of web page resources, scrolling can be performed from the child division (for which scrollbar can be hidden) instead of parent division.

 

The wrapper division needs to be a block which should occupy total web page available and CSS property overflow should be set to auto.

div.wrapper {
display: block;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
overflow: auto;
}

 

  • Hiding scrollbars from the wrapper division: The browsers which uses webkit as the browser engines provides scrollbar to every DOM element as webkit-scrollbar which can be customized according to our need. We can now turn scrollbar background to transparent or either set width to 0. Now, since problem of shifting of DOM elements exists, we can need to set width to 0.

.wrapper::-webkit–scrollbar {
width: 0px;
}

 

  • Blocking Scroll Blocks: For Angular Material Dialog box, same problem exists since Scroll blocks sets the CSS property of HTML to scroll. This causes the whole  html element to have a scroll. For the same, we can set overflow to hidden by using \deep\ tag to change CSS property deeply of different component of Angular project.

/deep/ html.cdk–global–scrollblock {
overflow: hidden;
}

References

Continue ReadingHiding the Scrollbar in HTML in the loklak Media Wall
Read more about the article Making Autocomplete Box Compatible with the Search Bar using Angular in Susper

Making Autocomplete Box Compatible with the Search Bar using Angular in Susper

A major problem in Susper was that we were using the same components on different pages, with different styling properties. A major issue was that the Autocomplete box was not properly aligned in the index page and looked like this:

This was happening because the autocomplete box width was set for 634 px, a width perfect for the search bar in the results page. The index page had a search bar of width 534 px, and the autocomplete box was too large for that.
Here is how the issue was solved:

  1. Changing the suggestion box html code:

id=“sug-box” class=“suggestion-box” *ngIf=”results.length> 0”>

</div>

The code uses *ngIf which is why setting the autocomplete box width using the typescript files becomes impossible. *ngIf does not load the component into the DOM until there are results, hence we didnot have the autocomplete box in the DOM until after the query was typed in the search bar. That was why we could not set its width, hence it was decided to remove this attribute. Using the ‘hidecomponent emitter’ is a better option here (used in the typescript file).

@Output() hidecomponent: EventEmitter<any> = new EventEmitter<any>();
if (this.results.length === 0) {
this.hidecomponent.emit(1);
} else {
this.hidecomponent.emit(0);
}

See autocomplete.component.ts for the complete code.

  1. It is now required to dynamically change the id of the suggestion-box depending on the page it is on, and apply the correct CSS.

Here is the html code:

<div [id]=”getID()” class=“suggestion-box” *ngIf=“results”>

The id of the suggestion box will now depend on the value returned from the function getID(), defined as follows:

getID() {
if ( this.route.url.toString() === ‘/’) {
  return ‘index-sug-box’;
} else {
  return ‘sug-box’
}
}
  • We first check if the route url is simply ‘/’ (which implies it is in the index page).
  • If yes the id is set to index-sug-box otherwise to sug-box.

Now we can write extra CSS properties for the index-sug-box id as follows:

#index-sug-box{
width: 586px;
}

References:

  1. For basic javascript functions: https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_functions.asp
  2. To understand components in Angular: https://angular.io/api/core/Component

 

Continue ReadingMaking Autocomplete Box Compatible with the Search Bar using Angular in Susper
Read more about the article Reducing Initial Load Time Of Susper

Reducing Initial Load Time Of Susper

Susper used to take long time to load the initial page. So, there was a discussion on how to decrease the initial loading time of Susper.

Later on going through issues raised in official Angular repository regarding the time takento load angular applications, we found some of the solutions. Those include:

  • Migrating from development to production during build:
    • This shrinks vendor.js and main.js by minimising them and also removing all packages that are not required on production.
    • Enables inline html and extracting CSS.
    • Disables source maps.
  • Enable Ahead of Time (AoT) compilation.
  • Enable service workers.

After these changes we found the following changes in Susper:

File Name Before (content-length) After
vendor.js 709752 216764
main.js 56412 138361

LOADING TIMES GRAPHS:

After:

Vendor file:

Main.js

Before:

Vendor file:

Main.js

Also we could see that all files are now initiated by service worker:

More about Service Workers could be read at Mozilla and Service Workers in Angular.

Implementation:

While deploying our application, we have added –prod and –aot as extra attributes to ng build .This enables angular to use production mode and ahead of time compilation.

For service workers we have to install @angular/service-worker module. One can install it by using:

npm install @angular/service-worker --save
ng set apps.0.serviceWorker=true

The whole implementation of this is available at this pull:

https://github.com/fossasia/susper.com/pull/597/files

Resources:

 

 

Continue ReadingReducing Initial Load Time Of Susper
Read more about the article Implementing Intelligence Feature in Susper

Implementing Intelligence Feature in Susper

Susper gives answers to your questions using SUSI AI. We want to give users best experience while they are searching for solutions to their questions. To achieve this, we have incorporated with features like infobox and intelligence using SUSI.

Google has this feature where users can ask questions like ‘Who is president of USA?’ and get answers directly without encouraging the users to deep-dive into the search results to know the answer.

Similarly Susper gives answer to the user:

It also gives answer to question which is related to real time data like temperature.

 

How we have implemented this feature?

We used the API Endpoint of SUSI at http://api.asksusi.com/

Using SUSI API is as simple as sending query as a URL parameter in GET request http://api.susi.ai/susi/chat.json?q=YOUR_QUERY

You can also get various action types in the response. Eg: An anwser type response for http://api.susi.ai/susi/chat.json?q=hey%20susi is:

actions: [
  {
    type: "answer",
    expression: "Hi, I'm Susi"
  }
],

 

Documentation regarding SUSI is available at here.

Implementation in Susper:

We have created an Intelligence component to display answer related to a question. You can check it here: https://github.com/fossasia/susper.com/tree/master/src/app/intelligence

It takes care about rendering the information and styling of the rendered data received from SUSI API.

The intelligence.component.ts makes a call to Intelligence Service with the required query and the intelligence service makes a GETrequest to the SUSI API and retrieves the results.

Intelligence.component.ts

this.intelligence.getintelligentresponse(data.query).subscribe(res => {
  if (res && res.answers && res.answers[0].actions) {
     this.actions = res.answers[0].actions;
       for (let action of this.actions) {
         if (action.type === 'answer' && action.mood !== 'sabta') {
           this.answer = action.expression;
         } else {
             this.answer = '';
         }
      }
   } else {
       this.answer = '';
   }
});

 

Intelligence.service.ts

export class IntelligenceService {
 server = 'http://api.susi.ai';
 searchURL = 'http://' + this.server + '/susi/chat.json';
 constructor(private http: Http, private jsonp: Jsonp, private store: Store<fromRoot.State>) {
 }
 getintelligentresponse(searchquery) {
   let params = new URLSearchParams();
   params.set('q', searchquery);
   params.set('callback', 'JSONP_CALLBACK');
   return this.jsonp
     .get('http://api.asksusi.com/susi/chat.json', {search: params}).map(res =>
       res.json()

     );
 }

Whenever the getintelligenceresponse of intelligenceService is called, it creates a URLSearchParams() object and set required parameters in it and send them in jsonp.get request. We also set callback to ‘JSONP_CALLBACK’ to inform the API to send us data in JSONP.

Thereby, the intelligence component retrieves the answer and displays it with search resultson Susper.

Source code for this implementation could be found in this pull:

https://github.com/fossasia/susper.com/pull/569

Resources:

Continue ReadingImplementing Intelligence Feature in Susper
Read more about the article Using Hidden Attribute for Angular in Susper

Using Hidden Attribute for Angular in Susper

In Angular, we can use the hidden attribute, to hide and show different components of the page. This blog explains what the hidden attribute is, how it works and how to use it for some common tasks.
In Susper, we used the [hidden] attribute for two kinds of tasks.

  1. To hide components of the page until all the search results load.
  2. To hide components of the page, if they were meant to appear only in particular cases (say only the first page of the search results etc).

Let us now see how we apply this in a html file.
Use the [hidden] attribute for the component, to specify a flag variable responsible for hiding it.
When this variable is set to true or 1, the component is hidden otherwise it is shown.
Here is an example of how the [hidden] attribute is used:

<app-infobox [hidden]=”hidefooter“ class=“infobox col-md-4” *ngIf=“Display(‘all’)”></app-infobox>

Note that [hidden] in a way simply sets the css of the component as { display: none }, whereas in *ngIf, the component is not loaded in the DOM.
So, in this case unless Display(‘all’) returns true the component is not even loaded to the DOM but if [hidden] is set to true, then the component is still present, only not displayed.
In the typescript files, here is how the two tasks are performed:
To hide components of the page, until all the search results load.

this.querychange$ = store.select(fromRoot.getquery);
this.querychange$.subscribe(res => {
this.hidefooter = 1;
…
this.responseTime$ = store.select(fromRoot.getResponseTime);
this.responseTime$.subscribe(responsetime => {
this.hidefooter = 0;

The component is hidden when the query request is just sent. It is then kept hidden until the results for the previously sent query are available.

2. To hide components of the page, if they were meant to appear only in particular cases.
For example, if you wish to show a component like Autocorrect only when you are on the first page of the search results, here is how you can do it:

if (this.presentPage === 1) {
this.hideAutoCorrect = 0;
} else {
this.hideAutoCorrect = 1;
}

This should hopefully give you a good idea on how to use the hidden attribute. These resources can be referred to for more information.

Continue ReadingUsing Hidden Attribute for Angular in Susper