Reusing Yesod widgets in AJAX results - haskell

I'm writing a very simple Yesod message list that uses AJAX to add new list items without reloading the page (both in the case of other users modifying the database, or the client themselves adding an item). This means I have to encode the HTML structure of the message items in both the Halmet template (when the page loads initially) and the Julius template (for when the dynamic addition happens). They look something like this:
In homepage.hamlet:
$if not $ null messages
<ul id=#{listId}>
$forall Entity mid message <- messages
<li id=#{toPathPiece mid}>
<p>#{showMarkdown $ messageText message}
<abbr .timeago title=#{showUTCTime $ messagePosted message}>
And in homepage.julius:
function(message) {
$('##{rawJS listId}').prepend(
$('<li>')
.attr('id', message.id)
.append('<p>' + message.text + '</p>')
.append($('<abbr class=timeago />')
.attr('title', message.posted).timeago())
.slideDown('slow')
);
}
I'd love to be able to unify these two representations somehow. Am I out of luck, or could I somehow abuse widgets into both generating an HTML response, and filling in code in a JavaScript file?
Note: Of course, I understand that the templates would have to work very differently, since the AJAX call is getting its values from a JS object, not from the server. It's a long shot, but I thought I'd see if anyone's thought about this before.

I think it's something of a AJAX best-practice to pick one place to do your template rendering, either on the server or client. Yesod is (currently) oriented toward doing the rendering on the server.
This can still work with AJAX replacement of contents, though. Instead of getting a JSON response from the POST, you should get a text/html response that contains the result of rendering the template on the server with the values that would have been returned via JSON and then replacing the innerHTML of the DOM node that's being updated.
If you want to support both JSON and HTML responses (to support 3rd party applications via API or something) you would have to make the format of the response be a function of the request; either appending ".json" or ".html" to the URL or including a HTTP header that lists the specific document type required by the client.
It would be nice if Yesod provided a 'jwhamlet' template or something that would render the HTML via javascript in order to support client rendering, but I'm not aware of one. That's not to say there isn't one I'm not aware of, though, so keep an eye open for other answers.
If you wanted to make such a thing, you might try tweaking the hamlet quasi-quote code so that instead of expanding the quasi-quotes to an html-generating function, it expanded them to a JSON-generating function and a pre-rendered chunk of text that's a template in mustache-style such that the JSON returned by the function would provide the correct context for the template to be rendered the way you want.

Related

Check for Javascript events on URL in C#

Ok, so I'm maintaining a legacy code where they are creating html on the backend side (a form) and in the action tag they are appending the value of the URL to make a redirect. There are no input of type texts anywhere to sanitize. The url comes from the request, they have an event handler to check if that is a redirect, etc.
Burp scan indicates that you can (of course) escape the Url and put a JavaScript event in it.
So the idea is to how can I detect if the Url has a JavaScript event, because this is already on an html we are sending I cant html encode it, because is not a text we are saving but a page they are showing.
How can I check if the string (which is the Url ) has JavaScript event escaped in it?.
What I tried is to ask if in the Url there is ' (the escape) but I yet to know if the url can contain such symbol, so it seems I have to analyze if we are seeing a JS Event.
So the url looks something like this: /Something/TheSession/123'onmouseover%3d'alert(1)'456
And then they are appending that url here on a stringbuilder:
sb.Append("<html><body><form name='Redirect' method='post' action='")
sb.Append(request.Url.PathAndQuery)
I already read some references like portswigger about XSS but in the Reflected XSS Script the example is in html tags which would be easier to check.

CKEditor inline with Node.js

I'm trying to create minimalistic content management system with ckeditor using node and express as a server. I would definitely want to implement the inline editing capabilities of ckeditor, but I'm having no success in sending the data to server and finally to nosql (mongodb) database.
I would like to have multiple inline editors within a page and to save to my database them simultaneously upon a POST event. I have my editor instances in invividual divs with an attribute contenteditable="true". Editor instances launch just fine, but when I'm trying to grab the data in my controller, all I have is an empty object. I can get the data from input fields, but then I lose the inline editing features. I've tried tinkering with bodyparser, but no success. All my divs containing the editable content lay under a HTML form element.
I would be more than happy is someone could at least point me to a general direction of how to accomplish this. Sorry if I was unable to make my self clear posting this question :)
tldr; How can I parse data from HTML elements, other than input-fields and text areas, in node/express with bodyparser?
Content of non-input fields won't be posted in a form, so you can't do that. A couple options come to mind:
Use JavaScript to update hidden inputs on the page as those divs change. Updated content will be posted.
Use JavaScript to make the POST, on save grab the contents, post them to the server, and then after that make the redirect from client side.

Can I render all zones to an HTML string in a controller method

I'm trying to render the HTML for a content item to a string from within a controller action. Technically I just want to get the "body" part of it without any header/footer stuff. I want to do this so I can get a content item rendering the way I want once, and then display it as a normal orchard page OR by requesting the HTML for the content item via ajax to display it in a div in a JavaScript app. I don't want to have to manually render everything in the JavaScript as that would be duplicating the layout logic I already did. I want to re-use the bulk of the server side rendering so any changes are reflected in my normal orchard page and my JavaScript page. I've been digging into the code and searching everywhere and have gotten close but not all the way there.
I found these:
How to render shape to string?
Using FindView in Orchard
In my controller I have:
var shape = _contentManager.BuildDisplay(contentItem);
Using either of the two methods above, I can render that shape to an HTML string in my controller. All was golden. I was getting the body of that page and using it in JS. Then, I changed a placement file:
<Place Parts_Common_Body="Content:1" />
was changed to:
<Place Parts_Common_Body="/AsideFirst:1" />
The body moved where I wanted it (AsideFirst) in my normal Orchard page but disappeared from the HTML retrieved using the two methods above.
If I look at shape.Content.Items after the BuildDisplay call, I can see the item for the body is no longer there... why is it not rendering all the zones? Or, I guess a more specific question is why is the BuildDisplay method not building the complete shape? Is there a way I can make this work?
I tried a million different things and eventually got this working. Not sure I totally get it yet, but I think the problem had to do with the fact that I was using shape.Content and I'd moved stuff out of the Content zone. And maybe when I was looking at what the BuildDisplay method was returning I was just not looking at some newly created zone that actually did had the stuff I thought was missing. Clearly I need to learn more about zones and shapes... Anyway, I have a new zone called "MainInfo" now that I created in a placement file. I get a MainInfo property on the main shape returned form BuildDisplay and pass shape.MainInfo to the view rendering code and all seems to be working well now.

Why does React.js' API warn against inserting raw HTML?

From the tutorial
But there's a problem! Our rendered comments look like this in the
browser: "<p>This is <em>another</em> comment</p>". We want those tags
to actually render as HTML.
That's React protecting you from an XSS attack. There's a way to get
around it but the framework warns you not to use it:
...
<span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: rawMarkup}} />
This is a special API that intentionally makes it difficult to insert raw HTML, but for Showdown we'll take advantage of this backdoor.
Remember: by using this feature you're relying on Showdown to be secure.
So there exists an API for inserting raw HTML, but the method name and the docs all warn against it. Is it safe to use this? For example, I have a chat app that takes Markdown comments and converts them to HTML strings. The HTML snippets are generated on the server by a Markdown converter. I trust the converter, but I'm not sure if there's any way for a user to carefully craft Markdown to exploit XSS. Is there anything else I should be doing to make sure this is safe?
Most Markdown processors (and I believe Showdown as well) allow the writer to use inline HTML. For example a user might enter:
This is _markdown_ with a <marquee>ghost from the past</marquee>. Or even **worse**:
<script>
alert("spam");
</script>
As such, you should have a whitelist of tags and strip all the other tags after converting from markdown to html. Only then use the aptly named dangerouslySetInnerHTML.
Note that this also what Stackoverflow does. The above Markdown renders as follows (without you getting an alert thrown in your face):
This is markdown with a ghost from the past. Or
even worse:
alert("spam");
There are three reasons it's best to avoid html:
security risks (xss, etc)
performance
event listeners
The security risks are largely mitigated by markdown, but you still have to decide what you consider valid, and ensure it's disallowed (maybe you don't allow images, for example).
The performance issue is only relevant when something will change in the markup. For example if you generated html with this: "Time: <b>" + new Date() + "</b>". React would normally decide to only update the textContent of the <b/> element, but instead replaces everything, and the browser must reparse the html. In larger chunks of html, this is more of a problem.
If you did want to know when someone clicks a link in the results, you've lost the ability to do so simply. You'd need to add an onClick listener to the closest react node, and figure out which element was clicked, delegating actions from there.
If you would like to use Markdown in React, I recommend a pure react renderer, e.g. vjeux/markdown-react.

Render partial view with jade on select change

I need to do the following,
I have a <select> (a list of team names), when the user selects a team, I get relevant information re: the team and display it.
How do I do this in jade?
I'm trying the following, (but I'm wrong obviously, I don't see a lot of documentation out there).
Briefly, I'm doing a include test.jade on my main page, and a res.render('test', {team: team_obj});
jade:
h1 #{team}.name
h2 #{team}.homeGround
h3 #{team}.manager
h4 #{team}.aka
nodejs:
collection.findOne(query, function(err, team_obj){
res.render('test', {team: team_obj});
});
I'm getting the information correctly in team_obj.
Get the following error when I run the app,
team is not defined
Now this is happening because test.jade is getting rendered before I feed it the team_obj.
Questions:
1) Am I doing this right? is include the correct way of partially rendering jade views? if yes, how do I make sure it renders only when the user has selected an option?
2) Is there a partial views concept in jade I'm unaware of?
1) you should use #{team.name}
2) you can't change the team object once the selector is changed. the template was rendered once with the database result. - such functionality should be handled by client side JavaScript and AJAX calls. partials in templates are just a way to share common pieces of templates, and its done in Jade via include.
I don't know what you're rendering and including and when.. but id you use a template variable like #{team.name} you have to make sure that the template was rendered with the team object.

Resources