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Adding Fallback Images in SUSI.AI Skill CMS

SUSI.AI Skill CMS shows image of a every skill. Here we are going to talk about a special case, where we handle the case when image is not found. We will be discussing the author’s skill component(all the skills by an author) and how we added fallback image in order to handle all the cases. For displaying image in table displaying all skills of author, we provide the path of image in SUSI Skill Data repository. The path is provided as follows :

let image = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fossasia/susi_skill_data/master/models/general/'+ parse[6]+'/'+parse[7]+'/images/'+parse[8].split('.')[0];

Explanation:
parse is the array which contains the models, language ISO code, and the name of the skill. This is obtained after parsing JSON from this endpoint :

"http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillsByAuthor.json?author=" + author;
  • parse[6]: This represents a model of the skill. There are currently six models Assistants, Entertainment, Knowledge, Problem Solving, Shopping and Small Talks.
  • parse[7]: This represents ISO language code of the skill.
  • parse[8]: This represents the name of the skill.

Now the image variable just needs the file extension. We have .jpg and .png extensions in images in our skill data repository. So we made two images :

let image1 = image + '.png';
let image2 = image + '.jpg';

The img tag only takes one attribute in src and we can only add a string in alt tag. Now we needed to check which image exists and add proper src. This can be solved by following methods:

We can use Jquery to solve this:

$.get(image_url)
        .done(function() { 
                // image exists
        }).fail(function() { 
                // Image doesn't exist
    })

This will result in more code and and also this does not handles the case where no image is found and we need to show the Circle Image component which takes first two letters of skill and make a circular component. After researching the internet we found a perfect solution to our problem. There is an npm package named react-image, which is an alternative to default img tag. Features of react-image package helpful to us are:

  • We can provide multiple fallback images in an array as source which will be used in order of index of array. This feature solves our problem of extensions, we add provide image with all extensions.
  • We can show a fallback element in case no images are loaded. This solves our second problem where we needed to show Circle Image component.

Code looks like this:

<Img
  style={imageStyle}
  src={[
       image1,
       image2
      ]}
  unloader={<CircleImage name={name} size="40"/>}
 />

Resources:

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