mojito-jscheck

mojito-jscheck

mojito-jscheck allows a Mojito server to know whether the user agent has JavaScript enabled while handling a request coming from that user agent!

Build Status

Usage

In your app's package.json, add the mojito-jscheck package as a dependency.

In your application configuration file, add the mojito-jscheck middleware. Note that it needs to appear after mojito-parser-cookies since it uses req.cookies...

"middleware": [
    ...
    "mojito-parser-cookies",
    ...
    "./node_modules/mojito-jscheck/middleware/mojito-jscheck.js",
    ...
]

In a controller, add mojito-jscheck-addon as a dependency. Then, call ac.jscheck.run() before ac.done(). This puts you into the jscheck cycle of redirects and cookie-setting which will establish your status.

If you're running jscheck in your app, you can check status at any time with ac.jscheck.status(), which returns either "enabled" or "disabled". If jscheck itself is disabled, ac.jscheck.status() returns "indeterminate".

How it works

• Initially, we don't know whether the user agent supports JavaScript. In that state, ac.jscheck.status() reports "enabled". Why? Because JavaScript is supported by 95 to 99% of the web traffic (depending on the locale...) and applications should optimize for the most overwhelmingly common cases... However, it is important to design web pages to degrade gracefully in case this guess happened to be incorrect (which will happen, albeit very rarely due to the persistence of the cookie we set)
• When calling ac.jscheck.run() in the "enabled" state, the jscheck add-on inserts a META tag inside a NOSCRIPT tag to redirect the user to [originalUrl]+&js=0
• The jscheck middleware sees js=0 in the url and sets a cookie (js=0).
• The jscheck add-on sees the cookie and reports the status as "disabled".
• When calling ac.jscheck.run() in the "disabled" state, the jscheck add-on inserts a SCRIPT tag which removes the cookie if the user has enabled JavaScript since the cookie was initially set.
• Status returns to "enabled". If the user ever disables JavaScript, the redirect sets the whole cycle in motion again.

This system relies on two basic assumptions:

• The overwhelming majority of user agents have JavaScript turned on.
• JavaScript does not get switched on or off very often...

Configuration

Any part of the configuration is optional. Here is a complete example:

"jscheck": {
    "enabled": true,
    "param": "foo",
    "cookie": {
        "name": "bar",
        "sub": "baz",
        "domain": ".my.domain.com",
        "expiration": 2592000
    }
}

With jscheck.enabled set to false, ac.jscheck.status() will return "indeterminate" and ac.jscheck.run() will not execute any meaningful code.

Notes

• jscheck does not support setting a sub-cookie. When writing the code, we considered it. However, there is little value in doing so. Also, the wildly varying formats used to encode sub-cookies, sign them, encode them, etc. would make this task difficult...