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Web app

note

This document explains how the Joplin Web App works from a technical perspective.

The Joplin Web App is a version of the mobile application that targets web using react-native-web. See BUILD.md for information about building the web app.

File system​

On web, shim.fsDriver wraps the Origin Private File System (OPFS). As of July 2024, some major browsers (Safari) only provide the synchronous versions of certain operations (e.g. createSyncAccessHandle). These synchronous operations can only be accessed in a web Worker.

In addition to files stored persistently through the OPFS API, the web fsDriver also supports non-persistent virtual files and access to local user-specified directories.

Virtual files​

In some cases, it doesn't make sense to write temporary files to persistent storage. To support this, fsDriver.web supports creating read-only virtual files with createReadOnlyVirtualFile. These files are stored in local memory and can be accessed using most fsDriver methods.

Local file access​

In some browsers, it's possible to mount local directories using fsDriver.mountExternalDirectory. This method takes a handle returned by showDirectoryPicker, which, as of 2024, has limited browser support.

To persist access to external directories, file system handles are stored in an indexedDB database, which supports storing and loading file system handles.

External files are mounted as subdirectories of the virtual /external/ directory.

Database and cross-origin isolation​

The web app uses @sqlite.org/sqlite-wasm for database access.

To function properly (likely due to use of SharedArrayBuffer), @sqlite.org/sqlite-wasm requires cross origin isolation to be enabled. This is done adding certain HTTP headers to responses from the server.

As of July 2024, the official deployment of the Web App is hosted on GitHub pages, which doesn't support serving with these headers. The Web App works around this by providing these headers in a ServiceWorker.

The Web App's ServiceWorker is a heavily-modified fork of the coi-serviceworker project, which enables cross-origin isolation.

Single-instance lock​

To prevent data corruption due to out-of-sync state between tabs, the Web App currently only allows one copy of the app to be open at a time.

This single-instance lock is enforced using a ServiceWorker. If a user attempts to load the Web App in a new tab, the ServiceWorker,

  1. determines whether the request is for the Web App (see handleRedirects in serviceWorker.ts),
  2. if so, intercepts the request,
  3. checks for an already-running copy of the app, and
  4. if a copy of the app is already running, returns an error page.

If the ServiceWorker fails to register (and cross-origin isolation is enabled by the server), it may be possible to bypass the ServiceWorker's single-instance lock. As such, a secondary single-instance lock is also present. This lock attempts to communicate with other open Web Apps using a BroadcastChannel:

  • This might succeed even if the original ServiceWorker failed to register.
  • This check might incorrectly report that only one app is open if other apps are in a different tab and haven't been used recently.

Offline support​

The ServiceWorker intercepts and caches responses to requests for certain file types from the same domain as the web client. In the future, when equivalent requests fail, the ServiceWorker responds with a cached response.

WebViews​

On all platforms, WebViews that load a local file should use ExtendedWebView. This component uses a different WebView implementation on different platforms:

  • Android and iOS use react-native-webview,
  • Jest uses JSDOM-based mock, and
  • Web uses a sandboxed iframe.
    • As of July 2024, react-native-webview does not support web.

This section summarizes how iframe-based WebViews work on web.

IPC​

High-level communication can be done with ExtendedWebView using an RNToWebViewMessenger paired with a WebViewToRNMessenger. These RemoteMessengers expose methods on JavaScript objects to content inside or outside a WebView.

Although RNToWebViewMessenger and WebViewToRNMessenger wrap .postMessage and .onmessage with a higher-level API, it's still possible to use the lower-level messaging API.

.postMessage​

For compatibility with react-native-webview, ExtendedWebView exposes a ReactNativeWebView global object to content running within the WebView.

For example, the following syntax can be used to send some message to the ExtendedWebView's onMessage handler.

ReactNativeWebView.postMessage(message) // Calls onMessage

window.onmessage​

Message sent to the WebView using webviewRef.postMessage are received by the global onmessage event. For example,

// ...within some component
const webViewRef = useRef<WebViewControl>();

return (
    <ExtendedWebView
        webviewInstanceId='test-webview'
        html={'some html here'}
        injectedJavaScript={`
            window.addEventListener('message', event => {
                if (event.origin === 'react-native') {
                    const messageData = event.data;
                    // ...use event.data...
                }
            });
        `}
        ref={webViewRef}
        onLoadEnd={() => webViewRef.current.postMessage('test')}
    />
)

Note viewer​

As on Android and iOS, the NoteBodyViewer uses an ExtendedWebView to render and display notes. However, because the Web App uses a virtual file system, extra processing is needed to transfer resources to the WebView.

For resources, this process might look like this:

A similar process loads plugin assets (e.g. CSS and fonts used by rendered math).

Incompatible libraries​

Some libraries are incompatible with react-native-web. There are two or more ways to handle this:

  1. Use the library only in an Android and iOS-only file. For example, if the library is used in shareImage.ts, create shareImage.web.ts with a web-only implementation. On web, the .web.ts extension is preferred to the .ts extension. On other platforms, this is not the case. As such, on web shareImage.web.ts will be imported, while on other platforms shareImage.ts will be.
  2. Replace the incompatible library with an empty mock (see web/webpack.config.js). This can be useful if the library is imported by a code that is known to be unreachable on web.