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How to store your app's entire state in the url

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Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#341

Post by 71bw »

jimbokun wrote: post #165
slivanes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

base64 does not have the problem here, iMessage has. Frustrating.

Agreed, iMessage should have URL detection that supersedes any other string parsing.

The fault doesn't lie in iMessage, it lies in Apple in general. Google's AOSP keyboard will IMMEDIATELY detect that you are writing a link when you'll put http(s):// in front of whatever else you're currently writing and will just shut up and let you finish without interrupting every 2 seconds with autocorrection suggestions. This does not happen on Apple's i(Pad/O)S keyboard, where typing a link will usually leave the user with an excercise in frustration, trying to fight over the autocorrection, which, for the 17th time, has decided to convert your URL into "normal words". Not even changing the keyboard seems to fix it, as, from what I remember, Gboard still uses Apple's prediction engine...

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#342

Post by ajuc »

bboygravity wrote: post #293
reaperducer wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we used to joke about LISP source code contains mostly brackets. There was a programming language in the 1970's called SAM76 that didn't care how many closing parentheses you had, as long as it was more than the number of opening parentheses. So, something like this was perfectly valid: a(1+r(em(2)))))))))))))))))))

That's genious IMO. Making sure the amount of opening and closing parantheses is equal is annoying and unnecesary. It screams "trust me all good with the closing parantheses".

    if ((v1.x()-v2.x())*(v1.x()-v2.x())+(v1.y()-v2.y())*(v1.y())-v2.y())+(v1.z()-v2.z())*(v1.z()-v2.z()) > distance*distance) {
        // collision
    }
Would you like this to fail to compile? Or would you prefer it to silently return the wrong value?

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#343

Post by ivanhoe »

typingerror wrote: post #55
AndrewStephens wrote: post #16

This is pretty common and has a bunch of advantages, like the fact you can link to and bookmark a particular state. Also, if you are careful you get undo and redo for free with the browser's back button doing all the work for you. The disadvantages are that your representation of internal state becomes part of the interface - if you ever change your app you need to deal with versioning the state so your new version c…

> If your app has a server component that acts on this state, be super careful about acting on it and treat it as you would any other input under user control. I would recommend signing it if it's generated by the server component, and checking the signature when the server component is provided this signed state. For example to do this in Node is quite straightforward. Key generation: const crypto = require('crypto'…

Excellent idea for those apps that need that type of protection. For many apps however ability to manually edit the link to get to the different state is actually a free bonus feature. I've built a CRM/Cases management app for the client that stores data filters in the url, and while there's a nice UI to control filters, we observed that lots of users simply go and edit the url directly to quickly get what they need.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#344

Post by rocho »

Altho00 wrote: post #335
spullara wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is it decoded: {"interval":"week","periodicity":1,"timeUnit":null,"candleWidth":4.3486590038314175,"flipped":false,"volumeUnderlay":true,"adj":true,"crosshair":true,"chartType":"line","extended":false,"marketSessions":{},"aggregationType":"ohlc","chartScale":"linear","studies":{" vol undr ":{"type":"vol undr","inputs":{"id":" vol undr ","display":" vol undr "},"outputs":{"Up Volume":"#00b061","Down Volume":"#ff3…

What is the point of the encoding ? Is it obfuscation for the common user ? What's wrong with http:// url.com/api/?interval=week&periodicity=1... since the encoded version is not shorter.

They have a nested structure, it's a pain to encode that in query parameters.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#345

Post by ivanhoe »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #216
AndrewStephens wrote: post #16

This is pretty common and has a bunch of advantages, like the fact you can link to and bookmark a particular state. Also, if you are careful you get undo and redo for free with the browser's back button doing all the work for you. The disadvantages are that your representation of internal state becomes part of the interface - if you ever change your app you need to deal with versioning the state so your new version c…

> This is pretty common and has a bunch of advantages, like the fact you can link to and bookmark a particular state. Conversely, you can't link to the newest version.

IMHO you should never store the data itself in the url, only the params that you use to fetch the data. So if the page is the list of the latest 10 posts in a category, you'll store the category in the url and the sorting criteria, not the IDs of the posts themselves. On the refresh you always get the fresh data.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#346

Post by itssumitrai »

divbzero wrote: post #86

App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding. As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsiLCJwZXJpb2RpY2l0eSI6MSwidGltZVVuaXQiOm51bGwsImNhbmRsZ…

In this case, its actually required. The state is actually for the entire chart. It has lots of settings not just the time duration but type of chart, crosshair should be set or not, then there are several types of chart studies which could be applied on chart along with their own settings. And also the chart drawings with their own settings. This feature is there so that people can share their own customized chart in full with others, and not a generalized chart.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#347

Post by itssumitrai »

tempestn wrote: post #320
b112 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say that many, many times, I have zoomed in, picked date ranges, added options, then pasted the yahoo finance url to others... and they have all those same configs passed. It's awesome and incredibly handy. Yahoo is on the ball here.

Agreed. However they could still simplify the urls a ton by including only non-default parameters, and still achieve the same thing.

Everything in chart is customizable, so no, its not possible to achieve the same thing in the way you are saying

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#348

Post by TeMPOraL »

NavinF wrote: post #337
TeMPOraL wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that joke funny until I realized that, if you sum the count of round, square, angle and curly braces together, your typical piece of C++ or Java code has more brackets than equivalent piece of Lisp code...

Well yeah that's a major reason why most programmers hate LISP syntax. It uses a parentheses for everything even though every keyboard has round, square, angle and curly braces.

I somehow doubt it. I tutored quite a few people of all ages who started to learn programming, mostly C, C++ and Java - they all initially have been mostly confused by the different kinds of brackets. They quickly understood where the brackets go (scopes/blocks, function calls, array declarations and access, etc.), but took some time to internalize which bracket type is used in which context.

I suspect the main reason programmers dislike Lisp syntax is that they try or see an example of some basic arithmetics, get surprised by the prefix notation that's so "unnatural" compared to the "obvious" infix notation they learned in primary school, and write off the entire language as weird, not noticing the fact that infix math is an exception in programming languages, as otherwise almost all code they write in any other language is in prefix notation too, just with a parenthesis shifted to the left.

A somewhat mind-blowing observation to some people:

  (foo (bar baz quux))
  
  foo(bar(baz, quux));
The two lines above are both in prefix notation. You can go from the first to the second one by a) shifting each left paren by one token to the right, and b) adding commas between whitespace-separated tokens.

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#349

Post by [deleted] »

spullara wrote: post #108
divbzero wrote: post #86

App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding. As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsiLCJwZXJpb2RpY2l0eSI6MSwidGltZVVuaXQiOm51bGwsImNhbmRsZ…

Here is it decoded: {"interval":"week","periodicity":1,"timeUnit":null,"candleWidth":4.3486590038314175,"flipped":false,"volumeUnderlay":true,"adj":true,"crosshair":true,"chartType":"line","extended":false,"marketSessions":{},"aggregationType":"ohlc","chartScale":"linear","studies":{" vol undr ":{"type":"vol undr","inputs":{"id":" vol undr ","display":" vol undr "},"outputs":{"Up Volume":"#00b061","Down Volume":"#ff3…

[deleted]

Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url

#350

Post by jansan »

Ndymium wrote: post #163

Last November I had covid and during that time I wrote a little pastebin that runs in the browser, compresses the paste data with Brotli, and puts it in the URL. It has line numbers, file naming, and syntax highlighting so it's feature complete for my own use. Here's a demo, but beware, the URLs are loooong: https://nicd.gitlab.io/t/#NhfW?Qm3F?6-&22c&CQZXuP+Aej5OXzXk7... I find it interesting to sometimes play around…

Is the Brotli compression done in the browser? If so, can you give some insight how this is done?
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