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Routing in Loklak Search SPA Hosted on GitHub-Pages

Single page applications like Loklak Search, are the ones which only have a single physical HTML page but has many different logical pages. This is achieved with the help of JavaScript, and angular provides strong abstraction to help the developers write the logical pages and Angular Router manages which page to display when a particular view is demanded. The Angular Router manages the URL state and the state of corresponding components.

Overview:

Now it’s important to understand how the routing works. In every web application structure, there is an index.html file, for SPA this is the only one single physical HTML page. This page is served when the base url is requested, ie. the web server gives this file to the client when the client requests for the base url of the application, in our case http://loklak.net/, This index.html page contains all the JS and CSS required by the application to work, which are loaded, as normal HTTP requests. When the javascript is loaded, the control of the application is governed by Angular which manages all the components, views and routes. When a user demands some route, the angular updates the view with the required components that are required to show the contents of that route.

 

It’s important to note here that no further simple requests are made by the client for any resource, angular is the one which controls all such requests. When we define routes in angular, say /search, we tell it what is the component which should be shown to the user when the route is /search, whenever the user navigates to such route angular shows the appropriate component, there is no request made by the client to the server for any such routes.

 

In Fact, the server doesn’t even know of such route, as they are defined in angular itself not, on the server side. The important fact is now what happens when the client refreshes the page when route /search is the URL, now the request is sent to the server which doesn’t know which page to serve when such request comes, so it will throw a 404: Page Not Found error.

Solution:

The solution to this situation is pretty straight forward, the server instead of throwing the 404 page, returns with the same index.html page. This makes the problem go away entirely, the server responds with the same page always, this page has the javascript to load and give control to angular, which when loaded, resolves which page to show according to the URL. This is a clean simple solution to the SPA routing problem. But this only works when you have access to Server Code, and you can request the server to respond with the same page whatever be the URL.

The problem with gh-pages:

But Loklak Search is deployed on gh-pages, and thus we don’t have any access to the server side code, to display the page of our requirements. GitHub pages just serve the HTML file which matches the corresponding URL, plain simple server. Now if on gh-pages we request for /search route it will respond with a 404 Error, as it is unable to find the search.html file in the directory.

How it is achieved in Loklak Search?

Loklak search is also deployed on gh-pages, to have a workaround to this problem we take advantage of the page served by gh-pages when the requested page is not found. When 404 error occur gh-pages responds with the 404.html file if it exists in the repository, else it responds with a default 404 page. We use this 404.html page to be able to load our main index.html page.

 

Here we have our 404.html file which is served by gh-pages whenever some url which is not unknown is requested

  • Here we first store the actual location which was requested by the user in the session storage.
  • Then we do a Redirective Refresh using the meta tag, to the root page ie. to load index.html which is known to gh-pages and is served.

https://gist.github.com/hemantjadon/9581dd0b4907c567b2a90eb949c5cbbc.js

<!-- 404.html -->
<!doctype html>
<html>
   <head>
  <!-- This stores the URL the user was attempting to go to in sessionStorage, and then redirects all 404 responses to the app’s index.html page -->
      <scrpt>
         sessionStorage.redirect = location.href;
      </scrpt>
         <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='http://loklak.net/'">
      </meta>
   </head>
   <body>
   </body>
</html>

And then in our index.html after loading the angular and all the resources, we run a function, it takes out the redirect key stored in session storage, and compare it to the current location.

If the locations don’t match, we replace the history state with the with the redirect and this time as angular is already loaded it knows which page to show to the user.

<!-- index.html -->

...

...

<scrpt>

   (function(){
     var redirect = sessionStorage.redirect;
     delete sessionStorage.redirect;
     if (redirect && redirect != location.href) {
        history.replaceState(null, null, redirect);
     }
   })();

</scrpt>

...

...

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