Add a way to pass blueprints via URL

[ricardoboss]

I'm working on something to generate blueprints and need a quick way to visualize them.
Your website would be perfect, if I could generate a direct link that includes the blueprint, which would spit out the image.

Is that possible?

[piebro]

That sounds cool and it should not be to difficult to add it. I think modifying the index.html should be enough for this. You can try to do it and create a PR, otherwise I might try it.

Browser have a max URL length, this might be a problem if the blueprint is too big, but at least for chrome it just be fine. The Limits:

Chrome/Edge: ~2MB (but practical limit around 32KB for usability)
Firefox: ~65,536 characters
Safari: ~80,000 characters

[ricardoboss]

I'd look into it. To future-proof this mechanism, I'd add some prefix to the url query parameter to indicate whether the following blueprint uses some kind of compression or not. What do you think?

[piebro]

Cool, I don't think a prefix about compression is really necessary, the official bluestrings are already quite well compressed: https://wiki.factorio.com/Blueprint_string_format

I think just a url query like bluesting=base64_bluestring ist good.

[ricardoboss]

In my draft PR (#7) I added handling for a ?bp=<blueprint> query parameter. The blueprint needs to be URL encoded (/ => %2F), but otherwise works as expected.

If not too out of scope, I'd like to be able to view just the image (without GUI) and maybe tweak some other things via URL. I guess this would need a second HTML page. What do you think?

[piebro]

Sounds good to use URL encoding.

I like the idea of having an extra html file for showing no UI (the blueprint option is still nice for the normal site). This make it cleaner. Do you still want the other functionality using key board keys or do you think of just having a static viewer?

I also think it would be cool to tweak other things with query parameters, e.g. the settings for drawing the blueprint. Do you also have other tweaks in mind?

[ricardoboss]

Settings for drawing was one thing I had in mind, yeah. I'm interested in a static viewer, no GUI, no interactivity, just the SVG. Since this is hosted on GH Pages, we probably can't achieve exactly what I want, but that's fine. Should I add it to the PR as well?

[piebro]

Yeah, that would be cool if you also add the additional static site.