Builder for offline applications

General
1

I’m exploring Builder and i was wondering if it fits for an offline application.
We would like to use it for our internal (offline) intranet environment…(blog/news entries)
Also we would like to use it for our internal digital signage screens in the building…our marketing team would love the visual editor.

My plan is to use the html api to get the plain html and store it in our database, from there on i would like to serve it via our offline applications.

I noticed this in the html output from the api

<script async src=\"https://cdn.builder.io/js/webcomponents\">

and

<img src=\"https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/pixel?apiKey=ef4deb057e8b4de98f6e7eae9b457de7\" role=\"presentation\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" class=\"builder-block builder-pixel-uzp7zoyfbcl css-1mvsfya\" builder-id=\"builder-pixel-uzp7zoyfbcl\"/>

As our internal digital signage screens and intranet are offline it could not connect to the pixel and js.

What does it mean?
Does the content need to load the pixel and js? The pixel is used for analytics/heatmaps?
Will the content not be shown properly without these data to load?

I hope you guys can help me.

Regards,

Wilco

2

Hi, @wikkes Welcome to Builder.io Forum!

We hope you’re doing well!

You can easily integrate builder with your application running on localhost/offline. I can recommend you the right doc and git repos example of integration if could you please help with the tech stack you’re using?

In the meantime, I recommend going through these docs:

Let us know if you face any issues while integrating!

3

Hello Garima,

Thank for your warm welcome.

The tech stack we are useing for these offline applications is nodejs with mongodb database.
The scenario i was thinking of is; we use a webhook to notify api endpoint that there is an entry published and that endpoint is getting content via html api to retrieve the content html.
This content html we are saving into mongodb to be shown on our offline applications(intranet and digital signage screens)

Would this be possible?

Regards

4

Hey, Yes, this sounds possible with Builder. I suggest going through these docs:

5

oke nice! i already read these docs to understand how builder works.
The only thing i do not understand is the pixel image and webcomponents js file in the html api.
My concrete question is this;
would it be a problem if an offline application cannot load the pixel img and webcomponents js file which the html api gives me back?
I’m not sure where this is being used for? (maybe for statistics?)

6

Hey @wikkes, Thanks for your patience on this!

  1. Pixel is used for tracking purposes that’s how builder.io tracks page views.

  2. Web components are for interactivity. It could be a problem if it doesn’t load because while you get the HTML from the HTML API, it would have stuff like <builder-component rev=\"8to5p000ag2\" api-key=\"e084484c0e0241579f01abba29d9be10\" name=\"page\" entry=\"70b6b98db9aa41b897d61a21a661e7a5\"> in it. The web components are what then converts this into fetching and rendering the actual code. There are some workarounds you can do to get it to work for you though. For example, you could download and store a local version of the webcomponents.js. And then whenever you fetch the HTML from our API, you could change the reference for web components to point to your local copy instead of the cdn.builder.io version.

I hope this helps. Feel free to contact us again if you have further questions!

7

Thanks for your reply.
That is a good idea to store webcomponents local, but i don’t think we use components so far. So that would not be a problem.

The pixel will not be able to track pageviews then, but we don’t use metrics in Builder.io for this…so i assume that will not be a problem also…

I don’t think anything will be a problem of this to show content in offline application.

Thanks again for your information and help.

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