Earlybirds for Preact

Earlybirds for preact is a wrapper around the earlybirds-js project and provides a set of components and helpers that'll facilitate the implementation of earlybirds.

Getting started

Let's say we have this recommendations block in our website and we want to display the earlybirds's recommendations instead of ours:

<div id='recommendations'>
  <!-- to be replaced -->
</div>

Explanation : the workflow

First, we need to create a datasourceId in our platform that corresponds to a customer referential ( internet account, CRM, … )

We can now make an identify request by providing a profile object that contains :

// case 1 : Create a new user
profile: {}

// case 2 : Identify the user by its profile id
profile: {
  id: {{profileId}},
}

// case 3 : Matching between visitor id and earlybirds profile id
// if you use this option, all properties are mandatory
profile: {
  datasources: [{
    id: {{datasourceId}} // the customer referential id,
    originalId: {{originalId}} // customer id in your referential
  }]
}

The identify request returns a profile ID that should be stored in a cookie for later use so we should re-trigger an identify only when needed (profile has changed or cookie is expired). The implementation detail is abstracted away because we use the earlybirds-js library from which earlybirds-ui is based on.

We then trigger the recommendation request by providing the widgetId and the profileId.

Implementation with preact

<Identify profile={PROFILE_CONFIG}>
  <Recos widgetId='WIDGET_ID'>
    {datas => {
      <RecosContainer datas={datas} />
      {mappedDatas =>  {
        <div>
          {mappedDatas}
        </div>
      })
    })
  </Recos>
</Identify>

We introduced 2 components from the earlybirds UI.

The first one is <Identify /> that is used to identify a visitor.

The second one is <Recos /> that retrieves the recommendation and expect a renderfn that will be called with the datas

The third component <RecosContainer /> do some intermediary processing and print the result. Here is RecosContainer implementation :

const RecosContainer = ({datas, children}) => {

  const mappedDatas = datas.map(x => <div>{x.product.title}</div>)
  <div>
    {children[0](mappedDatas)}
  </div>
}

/* output a list of product */

Components UI

<Identify profile={Object}>

Accept a profile object as parameter and perform an identify request when needed. Render its child when identify request is completed.

<Recos widgetId='String' [automount={true}]>

Accept a widgetId as parameter to retrieve the recommendations list. Also expect a component attribute or a child component where the 'datas' will be rendered to as props.

widgetId (mandatory) : the widget id

automount (optional) : Earlybirds getRecommendations call returns a location path where the widget will be mounted to. The default value is true. Can be set to false if you want to disable the feature. You can also pass a selector (ex: 'body .another-location') if you want to mount the widget elsewhere.

<Slider settings={Object} elementToShow={Number}>

Accept 'datas' as parameter and call a renderFn with the wrappedDatas.

elementToShow : number of element per slide

settings : accept a configuration to handle responsiveness

const settings = {
  responsive: [{
    bp: 1024, // screen size
    elementToShow: 5
  },{
    bp: 768,
    elementToShow: 3
  },{
    bp: 480,
    elementToShow: 1
  }]
}

Example

<Slider datas={datas} settings={settings}>
  {list => (
    <div>
      {list}
    </div>
  )}
</Slider>

datas object should be wrapped inside a component before passing it to Slider.

It will display :

• 5 elements when the screen size is 768 or above
• 3 elements when the screen size is between 480 and 768
• 1 element when the screen size is under 480

Configuration

In order to work, we need to enable the css module in webpack

rules: [
  {
    test: /\.css$/,
    loaders: ['style-loader', 'css-loader?modules&importLoaders=1']
  }
]

Testing

# run the tests
npm run test

See also

Earlybirds-js

Earlybirds API documentation