embed-core
This is the vanilla JS core script that embeds Cal Link.
How to use embed on any webpage no matter what framework
See https://developer.cal.com/embed/install-with-javascript
You can also see various example usages here
Development
Run the following command and then you can test the embed in the automatically opened page http://localhost:3100
yarn dev
Running Tests
Ensure that the main App is running on port 3000 (e.g. yarn dx) already. Also ensure dev server for embed-core is running and then run the following command:
Start the server on 3100 port
yarn dev
And from another terminal you can run the following command to execute tests:
yarn embed-tests-quick
Note: getEmbedIframe
and addEmbedListeners
work as a team but they only support opening up embed in a fresh load. Opening an embed closing it and then opening another embed isn't supported yet.
Shipping to Production
yarn build
Make dist/embed.umd.js
servable on URL http://cal.com/embed.js
DX
- Hot reload doesn't work with CSS files in the way we use vite.
Steps to make a page compatible with Embed
- Define
main
class on the element that has the entire content of the page with no auto margins
- Adding
main
class allows iframe height to adjust according to it, making sure that the content within main
is visible without scrolling as long as device dimensions permit it. - It also becomes the area beyond which if the user clicks, modal-box would close.
Known Bugs and Upcoming Improvements
-
Unsupported Browsers and versions. Documenting them and gracefully handling that.
-
Need to create a booking Shell so that common changes for embed can be applied there.
-
Accessibility and UI/UX Issues
let the user choose the loader for ModalBox
If the website owner links the booking page directly for an event, should the user be able to go to events-listing page using back button ?
Let the user specify both dark and light theme colors. Right now the colors specified are for light theme.
- Transparent support is not properly done for team links
- Maybe don't set border-radius in inline mode or give an option to configure border-radius.
-
Branding
- Powered by Cal.com and 'Try it for free'. Should they be shown only for FREE account.
- Branding at the bottom has been removed for UI improvements, need to see where to add it.
-
API
- Allow loader color customization using UI command itself too. Right now it's possible using CSS only.
-
Automation Tests
- Run automation tests in CI
- Automation Tests are using snapshots of Booking Page which has current month which requires us to regenerate snapshots every month.
-
Bundling Related
- Comments in CSS aren't stripped off
-
Debuggability
- Send log messages from iframe to parent so that all logs can exist in a single queue forming a timeline.
- user should be able to use "on" instruction to understand what's going on in the system
- Error Tracking for embed.js
- Know where exactly it’s failing if it does.
-
Color Scheme
- Need to reduce the number of colors on booking page, so that UI configuration is simpler
-
Dev Experience/Ease of Installation
- Do we need a one liner(like
window.dataLayer.push
) to inform SDK of something even if snippet is not yet on the page but would be there e.g. through GTM it would come late on the page ?
-
Option to disable redirect banner and let parent handle redirect.
-
Release Issues
- Compatibility Issue - When embed-iframe.js is updated in such a way that it is not compatible with embed.js, doing a release might break the embed for some time. e.g. iframeReady event let's say get's changed to something else
- Best Case scenario - App and Website goes live at the same time. A website using embed loads the same updated and thus compatible versions of embed.js and embed-iframe.js
- Worst case scenario - App goes live first, website PR isn't merged yet and thus a website using the embed would load updated version of embed-iframe but outdated version of embed.js possibly breaking the embed.
- Ideal Solution: It would be to keep the libraries versioned and embed.js should instruct app within iframe to load a particular version. But if we push a security fix, it is possible that someone is still enforcing embed to load version with security issue. Need to handle this.
- Quick Solution: Serve embed.js also from app, so that they go live together and there is only a slight chance of compatibility issues on going live. Note, that they can still occur as 2 different requests are sent at different times to fetch the libraries and deployments can go live in between,
-
UI Config Features
- How would the user add on hover styles just using style attribute ?
-
If just iframe refreshes due to some reason, embed script can't replay the applied instructions.
-
React Component
onClick
support with automatic preloading
-
Shadow DOM is currently in open state, which probably means that any styling change on website can impact loader.
Pending Documentation
-
READMEs
- How to make a new element configurable using UI instruction ?
- Why do we NOT want to provide completely flexible CSS customization by adding whatever CSS user wants. ?
- Feature Documentation
- Inline mode doesn't cause any scroll in iframe by default. It looks like it is part of the website.
-
cal.com/docs
- A complete document on how to use embed
-
app.cal.com
- Get Embed code for each event-type