Generator Not Working?

[johnshew]

There are some comments in Hacker News that people have tried the generator from manifoldjs.com and reporting that it isn't working.

I just did a quick test and it didn't come back. Might want to check into this.

[nbellocam]

Thanks for reporting this. Hacker News link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9487941

[nsbingham]

@johnshew if you don't mind me asking, what URL were you using when it failed?

[johnshew]

I don't know what the person on Hacker News was seeing.

Here is the quick test I tried. Just went to http://www.manifoldjs.com/generator.

Entered bing.com as the web site. Hit next. Gave it the name Bing. And hit generate package. Spins. Nothing happens.

It indicates "building package" but then nothing - no package, no error message.

[iCityWork]

I am not able to use it either, I go to http://www.manifoldjs.com/generator and enter all the info required, I get 0 errors and 0 warnings, 1 suggestion
{
mjs_urlAccess
Required value: It is recommended to specify a set of access rules that represent the navigation scope of the application. Platforms affected: all.
}

Hit Generate and it acts like it is going to do something but never spits out the file.

Help?
Gavin

[nsbingham]

@johnshew Some updates were pushed to the site that have hopefully fixed the issue you were experiencing.

@iCityWork Would you mind sharing what browser you're using and the URL for which you're trying to generate a package?

[iCityWork]

@nsbingham I am using Chrome Version 42.0.2311.135 m
last tried about 30 min ago.

[boyofgreen]

I received a similar issue tonight. I tried with Bing.com 4 times, and it failed for one of them. And when it failed, no error message or anything.

[boyofgreen]

I was using ie11 on windows 8.1

[johnshew]

After a couple of experiments it appears that the generate step fails silently if you fail to have mjs_urlAccess defined.

This is significant for a few reasons:

• We should NOT require mjs_urlAccess - instead if it is needed and missing is should default to initial URL provided.
• The right hand pane indicates that having mjs_urlAccess is just a suggestion. Per above this should be correct, but if not needs to be listed as an error.
• Failing silently on generate is bad behavior. Recommend we should have some sort of developer status while the generate step is happening - maybe just show the -l debug output.

[johnshew]

Opps- accidently closed this issue.

[alexkrolick]

Should be more explicit about the format for scope. Does it take a list? Regex? I found that using / as the scope loaded a black page on Android, but relative paths are shown on the W3C example. Ultimately it seems that * should be the default value if you want sites to be able to behave as expected.

[marcoscaceres]

"*" is not a valid default: that will just default to "http://example.com/*/" (literally * path).

[marcoscaceres]

(argh, fixed comment above... it ate my ⭐s)

[marcoscaceres]

Filed bug on the spec to add more examples of scope:
w3c/manifest#380

[alexkrolick]

Sounds like there may be differing implementations of scope. When I built for Android, I got a page with no CSS or images if I used /, plus no way to navigate off page. I got a page with no images (served over Cloudfront so off-domain) if I used https://domain.com/*. When I set the scope to * it worked as expected.

[marcoscaceres]

@whokilledtheelectricmonk whoa, strange. Is that for a generated package for Android? Can you provide a bit more details?

[alexkrolick]

Just checked on the iOS emulator - same result. The only way off-domain resources are loaded is to provide * in the scope field. I observed the behaviour on an actual Android device using $ cordova run android with a device plugged in. Platform: Mac OS 10.10.

Summary:

*: Everthing loads
https://mysite.com: Can navigate to subpages but no cross-site resources load
https://mysite.com/*: Same as above
https://mysite.com/: Can't navigate off-page, no css or images load
/: blank page

[ghost]

I created a new issue for the discussion about how manifoldjs processes the scope variable

[ryanbillingsley]

The generator should now let you know if the build failed and provide any error information it has.