Save Javascript-Generated HTML to the Server

Question

I'm working on an e-commerce website using Power Reviews to manage product reviews. That service uses javascript to display the reviews on our webpages, which means the content is unlikely to be indexed by search engines. I'm trying to work around this so that the review content can be rendered server side, and therefore indexed.

Their script has two components that we place on our page. First, the script file is placed in the HEAD: http://cdn.powerreviews.com/repos/16238/pr/pwr/engine/js/full.js

Then we call the script where we want it to render HTML on the page, including the ID for the product:

POWERREVIEWS.display.engine(document, { pr_page_id : "product-id-here" });

My current theory is that I could set up a page that runs the javascript, then save the resulting page to a static HTML document. I could then pull that into the product page when it loads. This would need to be automated to update the HTML file for every product a couple of times per day, but there are only a couple dozen products, so I don't expect that to be too overwhelming on the server.

How would I do this? I haven't seen a good way to execute the javascript so I can save the output. Is there a better way to tackle this problem?

Thanks for your help.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:13:14Z

1

OK... better answer.

The best solution that I could find is to use HtmlUnit http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/ on the server to execute your html with the javascript and get back the final html that the user would see on the browser.

The library has good support for JavaScript and is headless so you should be able to run it on the server.

You would need to write a small Java wrapper that could accept input via the command line and pass it onto HtmlUnit for processing and then return the result to you. You could then call this wrapper from PHP.

See here: Execute javascript in PHP

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:13

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Mar 5, 2013 at 4:14

user1781710

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

5 Comments

Emery King Over a year ago

Not sure what you are talking about but there is no way jquery does anything if javascript is not used.

user1781710 Over a year ago

My point was that modern jQuery and jQuery UI use plain HTML objects that are machine readable and searchable so the problem of dynamic only generated JavaScript text is a thing of the past.

Emery King Over a year ago

Well jQuery doesn't get a chance to be anything more than a text file with most if not all search engines, because they don't process javascript, so that doesn't matter.

Emery King Over a year ago

In this case, he does not have the content, it is brought in by javascript, so search engines don't ever see it. Not sure what a dialog box has to do with that.

Josh P. Over a year ago

Thanks for pointing me in that direction. Let me do a little digging into it to see if that works for me. I'm not familiar with HtmlUnit at all. Can something like this be run in a shared hosting environment?

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Save Javascript-Generated HTML to the Server

1 Answer 1

5 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

5 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related