March was an exciting Month for Puppeteer Sharp. CI Server is up an running. Version 0.3 was released, implementing IDisposable, many Puppeteer features (such as User dat dir support) and also fixing many process leaks. We also released v.0.3.1, adding .NET Framework support.

We are now working on v0.4, which is mostly Page releated. We have implemented all these features:

  • Page.SetJavascriptEnable
  • Page.SetContent
  • Page.EvaluateExpression and Page.EvaluateFunction
  • Page.Title
  • Page.Url
  • Page.Browser

What can you do so far?

Page.SetContent, Page.EvaluateExpression and Page.EvaluateFunction are super exciting features.

Page.SetContent

Page.SetContent allows you to inject HTML into a Page. Just to give you an example, with SetContent you could implement a batch process to create receipts in HTML, print it to PDF, and send it to a customer.

using(var page = await Browser.NewPageAsync())
{
    await page.SetContentAsync("<div>My Receipt</div>");
    var result = await page.GetContentAsync();
    await page.PdfAsync(outputFile);
    SaveHtmlToDB(result);
}

Pretty cool huh?

Evaluate functions and expressions

The ability to inject and execute javascript functions and expressions is important not only to the user but also important for Puppeteer Sharp itself. Many features are based on this feature.

In Puppeteer these 2 features are implemented using the evaluate function, where expressions are being passed as string and functions as javascript functions. This is easy to implement in NodeJS because you can toString() a function (it returns the javascript code as string) and send it to Chromium. Though we could implement a C# translation to Javascript functionality, I think it doesn’t worth the effort now.

using (var page = await Browser.NewPageAsync())
{
    var seven = await page.EvaluateFunctionAsync<int>(“4 + 3”);
    var someObject = await page.EvaluateFunctionAsync<dynamic>("(value) => ({a: value})", 5);
    Console.WriteLine(someObject.a);
}

Progress

  • Tests on Google’s Puppeteer: 554 (prev. 548)
  • Tests on Puppeteer Sharp: 55 (prev. 19)
  • Passing tests: 55 (prev. 19)

Activity

  • Repository Stars: 50 (prev. 27) +85%
  • Repository Forks: 7 (prev. 5) +40%
  • Nuget downloads: 478 (prev. 195) +143%
  • Contributors: 1

Contributors

Meir Blachman pushed 6 PRs out of 17 and reviewed all my PRs. The project got an steady pace and code quality has improved since he jumped it.

What’s Next

I hope we can release v0.4 in April. 39% of the features are implemented but this version is important and many features are challenging.

Final words

I started receiving feedback from the community, and this is great, it’s what we need. But on the other hand it also showed me that we need to make more progress in order to have Puppeteer Sharp ready for the real world.

I’m looking forward to getting more feedback. The issues tab in github is open for all of you to share your ideas and thoughts. You can also follow me on Twitter @hardkoded.

Don’t stop coding!

Previous Reports