Lets say I have a chrome extension which watches which url the user is at, could this chrome extension look for a special delimiter in the url(like a hash fragment) to signal an action to take? Here's an example:
The user clicks the link
https://google.com#signaltoextension
The extension could then check the url for the #signaltoextension and take some action.
The problem with this approach is, what if the url already has a hash fragment on it?
could I do something like this?
https://google.com#preexistinghashfragment##signaltoextension
Basically, I'm looking for a proper delimiter that allows a user without the extension to follow the link without consequence, but if a user has the extension for it to take action.
Here's my use case:
A user with the extension is at the link:
https://google.com
He wants to associate some information with this link to share it with another user. Lets say, in the extension he associates the information "google rocks" with google.com, the extension sends this to the my server along with the user's username, lets say his username is linkguy. Then linkguy shares the link https://google.com{delimiter}linkguy with another user. The other user visits this link, the extension sees the delimiter, queries the server for google.com{delimiter}linkguy, then the extension displays "google rocks". If someone who does not have the extension clicks the link, it should simply follow the link without consequence.
Well, no. There can only be a single fragment identifier, and you will break the existing one.
Moreover, the fragment identifier is often processed by both the server (analytics tracking) and the client-side code, so passing a fragment identifier is not guaranteed to be "without consequence".
You can, in principle, try to catch such a "special" identifier with WebRequest and cut it out before the request is sent. But for people without the extension, that would break it.
Related
I am importing/creating drafts in Gmail using the Gmail API. After creation I'd like to redirect the user to the Gmail UI with the opened Draft in the composer window.
I made it work properly for https://mail.google.com/mail/#drafts?compose=[MESSAGE ID]. Other urls I found here also worked well. Gmail is doing some redirects and eventually the composer window is opened with the draft.
Now my issue:
If the user has not enabled "Conversation view" this will not work at all. The redirect will then result in https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#drafts?compose=new and only an empty, new composer window is shown and a new draft is created by the UI.
If I open the draft directly the ID-format is different. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#drafts?compose=hJzgZpSqgLQcCWgZqnlNRzRBfMbjZVnZklzvcFxhQCdwT... and I have no idea if this format can be generated somehow.
Does anybody has an idea or experience to also make it work with this UI setting. How I can force Gmail to load the draft into the composer window?
Thanks in advance.
If you have Email Threading > Conversation View enabled
Make use of the following URL
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox?compose=DRAFT_MESSAGE_ID
If you have disabled the Email Threading > Conversation View option
Make use of the following URL
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/DRAFT_MESSAGE_ID
Additional information
The main difference between them is that the first is treated as a conversation while the second example is not.
You can use #drafts instead of #inbox in the URL.
The number after .../mail/u/ is the session you have opened
You can retrieve the DRAFT_MESSAGE_ID by making a request to the API
You can approximately generate the compose ID by yourself, there are some examples out there (not recommended). I strongly recommend you to use the DRAFT_MESSAGE_ID instead.
This appears to still be an issue the one solution I did find was that you can find your draft directly (even though it would be the last draft) and go through multiple accounts by redirecting to
https://accounts.google.com/AccountChooser?authuser={user account}&Email={email account}&continue=https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/rfc822msgid:CAMU-31NcJCVHyGNsAycRKfuS0nMonoaZ6wFMD90Sej996qjuPQ#mail.gmail.com
You need to get your message id toi replace the area from <> from your draft. So you'll have to create the draft first. Get the google message ID, then use that with messages/get to get the Global Message Id (also referred to as message id) and then use that with a search. At this point you'll open a page with a search to a single draft but it will not be opened. Your users will have to click on the one message. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to have the good way work for conversation view, and this way work for non.
I tried many different URLS and nothing worked. As noted in the original question, it might work that you could link to the full URL but I see no way to get that. If you spend long enough working with an email you'll even find that ID changes so they aren't even stable within a single day.
Another solution that could work is as explained:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/DRAFT_MESSAGE_ID
But as noted this does not open the draft on the first time you go there. It seems you have to travel to that link 2 times in a row to get the message to appear. I guess you could go to the page maybe inject some javascript to go to the page again but I don't know how to do that.
Is it possible to determine if a user came to your site by clicking a link shared in whatsup, viber or some other popular messenger?
They usually do send request to shared link so that they get metadata to display, and that can be determined through the user agent. However, when user actually clicks on link, unless messanger has browser built in, user agent is whatever browser they opened it in.
Using apache/nodejs/vuejs
Apparently, it is impossible. When a clicked link or programmatic request invokes a web URI intent, an OS allows the user to select an app from a dialog where it can be opened. So it doesn't add any additional information to the link while opening.
Probably make sense to consider generating unique links for every application so that you know where the user comes from.
https://hostname.com/home?userAgent=skype
https://hostname.com/home?userAgent=facebook
I'm building a website for a client (real estate), and on the website are links to a different website (adverts for properties). My client routinely activates and deactivates these adverts when he rents out a certain property.
The hrefs on my links look something like this:
<a href="https://domain.xx/estate/idxx/des-crip-tion-xx-xx-x-xx/">. If the advert is indeed active, it just takes them to the advert. If it is not active, however, the website in question redirects the user to https://domain.xx/estate-for-rent/city/, effectively sending the users to my client's competition.
I wish to implement some logic where, before handing the users over to the other website, the server checks to see if it is redirected to https://domain.xx/estate-for-rent/city/, or some similar logic, and if so, uses preventDefault, or something, and notifies the user that the advert is not available instead of sending them to the other website.
I wonder if I can use the fact that only if the advert is active does the resulting url in the users browser window (after they've been directed to the other website) match the url in my href. Can i somehow get the server to try to access the url in my href, and have it see where it gets redirected, and then do something based on that? On the back-end, I'm running NodeJS with Express by the way, and if it matters, I'm relying heavily on EJS for templating. Thanks in advance for any help!
This sounds more like a problem you could solve on the client as opposed to the server. For example, at a high level here's how I would do it:
Handle the click event for each link (really simple to do a catch-all with jQuery)
Fire off a HEAD request via AJAX to the destination URL (this would be much more efficient than a GET but depends on the external service supporting this verb)
Use the status code to determine what to do next (e.g. 2xx allow redirect, 3xx pop a message and block)
I have a browser extension which is scraping the threadId from the URL when the user is reading an email in Gmail, and is using this threadId to fetch circumstantial data using the Google Apps Script API.
The extension do however not know which of maybe several Google accounts are reading this message; it knows only the URL to my Apps Script webapp and the threadId. So when it executes the fetch, the webapp will the interpret request as coming from the default user session, which in some cases is wrong and will thus result in an null when executing GmailApp.getThreadById(e.parameter.threadId).
So what I am wondering is whether it is possible to specify what Google account to use when querying the webapp. Are there any possibilities other than asking the user to log off all other accounts and set the current one as default?
Unfortunately Google Apps Script does not have good support for multiple logins. See this page for more information.
You can add an authuser parameters to the requests you make to your the Google Apps script.
The authuser param's values are zero based indexes for all the Google accounts that are logged in the current browser session.
Now for extracting what index value you need to send, you can scrape the current page for profiles.google.com links that have authuser param and extract your value from them and send it with your requests.
The link might look like this:
https://profiles.google.com/ ... authuser=0
Specifically for gmail, the url also contains the current authuser index, For example:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox
This URL above contains the authuser value 1 at the end (before the fragment and after /u/)
I know this is very complex and is looks more like a hack. But I think this surely is a workaround, until Google provides a better way to specifying the context for your apps script requests.
I hope this might be helpful.
Thanks.
I'm trying to post a username & password from an HTML form to a protected folder on a website? Is this possible? I thought I just pass in a syntax in the URL like the below but not having any success
http://username:password#theurlofthesite.co.uk
I'm still getting the alert pop up asking for the username and password? I need to be able to auto log the person in..
Hope someone can help? Thanks
If you login via a HTML form, then this won't work. This is only for HTTP authentication, which is something else completely different.
I don't think many (any?) browsers support being opened to post data. Which leaves you hoping that the site accepts GET based logins (and they should be shot if they do.).
The address part of the URL is parsed by your web server, so the code which handles the HTML form never sees it.
If you want to pass parameters to a form, you must use url?field=value&field2=value2. This only works with forms that use the GET action. For POST, you need a program to generate an encoded document and upload that.
In both cases, your user name and password are broadcasted as plain text on the Internet, so the account will be hacked within a few hours. To put it more clearly: There is no way to "protect" the data in this folder this way. This is like adding a door with four locks to your house and keep the keys on a nail in a post on the street next to the door.
I did exactly what I did in the question and it works on all browser except Safari on a Mac