bloomreach-experience-react-sdk

BloomReach Experience SDK for React

SDK for powering content and components in React applications by BloomReach Experience. This library makes integrating a React app with BloomReach Experience a breeze. It supports both client-side- and server-side rendered/isomorphic React apps.

BloomReach Experience allows you to use an external front-end such as React for rendering while still providing a native-like authoring experience, such as integrated preview, in-context editing, drag & drop, server-side personalization. For more information on this approach, see A new approach to integrating SPA's with WCM: Fixing what's wrong with headless integrations.

Install

npm install bloomreach-experience-react-sdk --save

Usage

import React from 'react'
import { CmsPage, RenderCmsComponent } from 'bloomreach-experience-react-sdk'

const componentDefinitions = {
  "MyCustomComponent": { component: MyCustomComponent }
}

class MyApp extends React.Component {
  render() {
    const currentUrl = window.location.href.pathname
    return (
      <CmsPage componentDefinitions={componentDefinitions} url={currentUrl}>
        { () =>
          <RenderCmsComponent />
        }
      </CmsPage>
    )
  }
}

At a minimum, <CmsPage> and <RenderCmsComponent> should be imported.

<CmsPage> fetches the Page Model if it is not supplied as a prop (see section on server-side rendering); it fetches updates on component changes in the CMS; and it initializes and manages state, and provides this as context to <RenderCmsComponent>.

<RenderCmsComponent> renders components based on the Page Model API response.

The <CmsPage> component can be put anywhere within a React App. It functions as a higher-order component (HOC). <RenderCmsComponent> consumes the state from <CmsPage> and renders the components and any content refereced from the components as contained in the Page Model API response. The <RenderCmsComponent> should be placed in the React app at the exact location where you want BloomReach Experience to render its components.

Please note that <CmsPage> takes children as a function instead of as a prop, because it is otherwise not possible to provide state through context providers due to a bug in React currently. So make sure to wrap any children of <CmsPage> in a function, as in the following example:

{ () =>
 // any children go here
 <h1>Blooming is what I do</h1>
}

<CmsPage> takes two props: componentDefinitions and urlPath.

The urlPath prop is used to fetch the Page Model for the page that is active; and to detect whether preview is active so that meta-data for Channel Manager functionality (e.g. in-context editing) is included in the HTML, and consequently Channel Manager functionality is enabled.

Finally, component definitions are supplied through the componentDefinitions prop. The component definitions tell <RenderCmsComponent> what React component to render by mapping these to the hst:label of a CMS catalog component.

Server-side rendering

For server-side rendering (e.g. using Next.js) you need to fetch the Page Model API server-side and supply it as a prop to <CmsPage>. Apart from this the usage is the same as with client-side rendering.

The helper function getApiUrl() can be used to generate the Page Model API URL using the current URL.

It is important to pass cookies from the initial request and supply these with the request header of the Page Model API request. Otherwise you will get a 403 error in preview mode.

Finally, to get preview to work for server-side rendered apps you can use a reverse proxy to route requests from BloomReach's site preview to the React App-server. For more details, see section 3.2 Server-side apps of the Hippo Lab: Integrate a React application with BloomReach Experience.

import fetch from 'isomorphic-unfetch'
import { getApiUrl, CmsPage, RenderCmsComponent } from 'bloomreach-experience-react-sdk'

// setting pageModel to empty list instead of null value,
// as otherwise the API will be fetched client-side again after server-side fetch errors
let pageModel = {}

const url = getApiUrl(asPath, {})
// pass cookies of initial request for CMS preview
const response = await fetch(url, {headers: {'Cookie': req.headers.cookie}})

if (response.ok) {
  try {
    pageModel = await response.json()
  } catch (err) {
    console.log(`Error! Could not convert response to JSON for URL: ${url}`)
  }
} else {
  console.log(`Error! Status code ${response.status} while fetching CMS page data for URL: ${url}`)
}

Creating custom components

Any components that are supplied through the compenentDefinitions prop can be any type of valid React component, including functional components. Props are passed to these components as context so that you can access the components' configuration, content, etc. See more information below.

Props

The following props are passed to a component that is rendered by <RenderCmsComponent>:

• configuration - Object component configuration. Contains the contributed models, raw parameters and resolved parameters. Content included in the component's model is not serialized as part of the component's configuration but in a separate content object, and a JSON Pointer reference is used to link to the actual content object. This is done to prevent content from being included multiple times in the API response when referenced multiple times.
• pageModel - Object full Page Model API response.
• preview - Boolean is true if preview is active based on current URL supplied through urlPath prop of <CmsPage>.

For more information on the Page Model API response, see the Swagger documentation.

Example

import React from 'react'
import NewsItem from './news-item'
import { getNestedObject } from 'bloomreach-experience-react-sdk'

export default class NewsList extends React.Component {
  render() {
    const preview = this.props.preview
    const pageModel = this.props.pageModel
    const configuration = this.props.configuration

    // return placeholder if no list is set on component
    const list = getNestedObject(configuration, ['models', 'pageable', 'items'])
    if (!list && preview) {
      return (<p>Click to configure {configuration.label}</p>)
    } else if (!list) {
      // don't render placeholder outside of preview mode
      return null
    }

    // build list of news articles
    const listItems = list.map((listItem, index) => {
      if ('$ref' in listItem) {
        return (<NewsItem contentRef={listItem.$ref} pageModel={pageModel} preview={preview} key={index}/>)
      }
    })

    return (
      <div className="row">
        <div className="col-sm-12 news-list">
          {listItems}
        </div>
      </div>
    )
  }
}

Content components

Components that reference a single content-item (e.g. the Banner component) can use a convenient wrapper-class that looks up the content and passes it as a prop. See below.

To enable this, the property wrapInContentComponent: true has to be set on the component in the componentDefinitions prop. See componentDefinitions in the API section for more details.

Props

• content - Object raw content object that contains the content-item's fields and field-values. Any references to other content-items (e.g. images) are serialized as JSON Pointers.
• manageContentButton - React.Component for placement and rendering of the Manage Content Button in preview mode in CMS.
• pageModel - Object full Page Model API response.
• preview - Boolean is true if preview is active based on current URL supplied through urlPath prop of <CmsPage>.

Example

import React from 'react'

const content = this.props.content;
const manageContentButton = this.props.manageContentButton;

class Banner extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <div className="my-content-component">
        { manageContentButton && manageContentButton }
        { content.title && content.title }
      </div>)
  }
}

More component examples

For more detailed examples, see the components included in the example applications.

Helper functions

Additionally, there are a variety of helper functions available. See the examples below. For full details on the APIs, see the API section.

import { createLink, getImageUrl, getNestedObject, parseAndRewriteLinks, parseDate } from 'bloomreach-experience-react-sdk'

const link = createLink('ref', link, linkText, className)
const image = getImageUrl(content.image, this.props.pageModel)
const list = getNestedObject(configuration, ['models', 'pageable', 'items', 0])
const contentHtml = parseAndRewriteLinks(content.content.value)
const date = parseDate(content.date)

API

<CmsPage>

The CmsPage component is a higher-order component that takes care of:

• Fetching the Page Model for client-side rendering, when not supplied as a prop.
• Fetching Page Model updates on component changes in the CMS.
• Initializing and managing state, and providing this as context to <RenderCmsComponent>.

Properties

• cmsUrls - Object Override default CMS URL's. (Optional)
• componentDefinitions - object Mapping of CMS catalog components to React components. Determines what component to render based from the Page Model. (Optional)
• createLink - Function Called when creating internal links so that links can be constructed using the router library of the React app. (Optional)
• pageModel - Object Supply Page Model as prop. Used for server-side-rendering where Page Model API is fetched server-side. When supplied, CmsPage will not fetch Page Model API on mount, only on component updates in CMS. (Optional)
• urlPath - String Current URL-path for determining if preview mode is active, and for fetching the Page Model for the page that is active. (Required)

cmsUrls property

Property that allows you to override the default URL's for fetching the Page Model API. Typically you will only have to define cmsScheme, cmsHostname, cmsPort, and cmsContextPath. Input object takes the following properties (all are optional):

• cmsScheme - String scheme (default: http)
• cmsHostName - String hostname (default: localhost)
• cmsPort - number port number (default: 8080)
• cmsContextPath - String site context-path (default: site)
• cmsChannelPath - String path to the used channel, if channel is accessed through a subpath
• cmsPreviewPrefix - String preview-prefix used by CMS (default: _cmsinternal)
• cmsApiPath - String path to Page Model API as subpath (default: resourceapi)
• cmsApiComponentRenderingUrlSuffix - String (default: ?_hn:type=component-rendering&_hn:ref=)

componentDefinitions property

Maps CMS catalog components to React components. Expects input object with hst:label of the CMS components as keys and React components as values.

Additionally, see example below:

const componentDefinitions = {
  "MyCustomCmsComponent": { component: MyCustomReactComponent },
  "AnotherCmsComponent": { component: AnotherReactComponent, wrapInContentComponent: true }
};

createLink property

Called when creating internal links so that links can be constructed using the router library of the React app.

Takes Function as input. The function should return valid JSX and have three parameters:

• href - String href of link
• linkText - Function contains the HTML that is wrapped inside the link. Is a function so that it can include HTML.
• className - String classnames to add to the link element

For example:

const createLink = (href, linkText, className) => {
  return (<Link className={className} to={href}>{linkText()}</Link>)
}

pageModel property

Page Model can be supplied as a prop when using a server-side rendered / isomorphic React framework. When supplied, <CmsPage> will not fetch the Page Model API client-side.

urlPath property

Takes String as input. Should only contain the URL-path (everything that comes after the hostname or domain name).

<RenderCmsComponent>

Renders a CMS component and all of its children using the Page Model supplied by <CmsPage>. Will render the entire Page Model by default.

Properties

• path - String path to a component (static CMS component), container or container-item in the Page Model to render only that component and its children. If no path is supplied, entire Page Model will be rendered.

Example

<RenderCmsComponent path={'main/container/banner'}/>

getApiUrl(urlPath, [newCmsUrls])

Helper function for generating URL to the Page Model API for server-side fetching of the Page Model.

Arguments

• urlPath - String URL-path (everything that comes after the hostname or domain name).
• newCmsUrls - Object takes cmsUrls property as input to override default CMS URL's

Return types

String returns URL for fetching Page Model API

createLink(linkType, link, linkText, className)

Creates a link to either a component or content-item itself or a referenced content-item (can be a document, image or asset) and returns the link as JSX.

Arguments

• linkType - String type of link to create. Valid values are self, ref or href.
  • self - Create link to the component or content-item itself. E.g. for a news-item in a news overview.
  • ref - Create link to a referenced content-item. E.g. for a banner.
  • href - Used by parseAndRewriteLinks() to create links using a href only.
• link - Object the component configuration or content-object that is linking to itself or referenced another content-item.
• linkText - JSX | Function HTML to wrap inside the link. Is a function so that it can include HTML.
• className - String classnames to add to the link element

Return types

JSX returns link as JSX object that can be included as a variable anywhere within the return section of a React component's render method.

getImageUrl(imageRef, pageModel)

Creates link to URL of image in case BloomReach Experience is used for serving images.

Arguments

• imageRef - String JSON Pointer that references the image.
• pageModel - Object since this function is a pure JavaScript function it can't get Page Model from context, so it has to be provided as function parameter. The Page Model is used to retrieve the image.

Return types

String returns URL to image.

getNestedObject(nestedObject, pathArray)

Returns a nested object or value using a path array. Useful when you need to access deeply nested objects/values without having to string null checks together.

Arguments

• nestedObject - Object the object containing the nested object or value.
• pathArray - Array contains the path to the nested object as an array.

Return types

Object|null returns the nested object if found, otherwise returns null.

parseAndRewriteLinks(html)

Parses HTML of a rich-text field of a content-item for rewriting links in HTML to internal links. Uses the createLink function passed to <CmsPage> for constructing internal links.

Arguments

• html - String value of rich-text field of a content-item. Should contain HTML only.

Return types

JSX returns parsed and rewrited HTML as JSX.

parseDate(date)

Parses date-field of a content item and returns date as a string.

Arguments

• date - String takes raw value of a date-field as input, following the ISO 8601:2000 format.

Return types

String returns date in full date format.

FAQ / Troubleshooting

Nothing here yet :)

Author

Robbert Kauffman - BloomReach