DEV Community: Manideep Pullalachervu

How to add the Whatsapp share button in Web Apps?

Manideep Pullalachervu — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 05:28:17 +0000

We see many web applications having this WhatsApp share button to share the content. Have you wondered how we can have it in our next web app? You know, it's very easy, as easy as using an Html element.

The only thing you need is the below universal links.

Example: https://wa.me/<number> 
Example: https://wa.me/<number>?text=<urlencodedtext>

Breakdown of above links:

The <number> is a full phone number in international format. Omit any brackets, dashes, plus signs, and leading zeros when adding the phone number in international format.

Examples:

Use: https://wa.me/919999999999

Don't use: https://wa.me/+91-9999999999

The <urlencodedtext> is a URL-encoded pre-filled message, that will automatically appear in the text field of a chat. URL encoding? converts characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet. HTML URL Encoding Reference

Example: 

https://wa.me/919999999999?text=I'm%20interested%20in%20your%20car%20for%20sale

How many ways we can use the above links:

We can create a link with just a pre-filled message, use https://wa.me/?text=urlencodedtext

We can create a link with no pre-filled message, use https://wa.me/<number>

Finally, how to use the link?

Example: 

<a href="https://wa.me/919999999999text=I'm%20interested%20in%20your%20car%20for%20sale">Share</a>

When a user clicks on the above link it opens the WhatsApp application installed on users device either it be a phone or desktop.

To learn more please visit: How to link to WhatsApp from a different app

Host An App Locally

Manideep Pullalachervu — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 03:46:10 +0000

I used to believe that we can't host an app locally and serve it to the world, as easily as we do with Heroku or Netlify. Until I found this NGROK. With ngrok we can still get a public URL like the URL we get after hosting our app with Netlify or Heroku.

Very briefly, ngrok exposes local servers to the public internet. More on how it works.

Where all the places we can use.

When doing development locally, we need public URLs for testing certain things like,

Exposing local web servers.
A webhook URL.
Will need redirect_url for OAuth.

These are few things, I used ngrok for. You can check more use cases from here. WHAT IT'S GOOD FOR

To get started with ngrok.

Download
Navigate to terminal and hit the command ngrok http <port_number>

There you go, now your localhost will be assigned a public url. Which you can share with anyone in the world, to use your app. On the free plan, ngrok's URLs are randomly generated and temporary. If you want to use the same URL every time, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Few more good things about ngrok, which I used.

Inspecting traffic.
Replaying request.

This is just a kick-start guide for beginners with ngrok. This is my very basic understanding after a couple of days of usage. Please go through the docs to learn more.

Bank Account Verification Programatically

Manideep Pullalachervu — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 04:21:38 +0000

If you want to verify a bank account programatically from the backend by just taking name, account number and IFSC from the frontend. Cashfree has a product for doing that. Bank Account Verification

Need to verify users bank account ?

The problem I have to solve in my BisKit project is very simple. I've to do payouts to users for which I need to verify their accounts for successful payouts. There could be a chance that user might have given wrong/invalid credentials.

My journey:

Create an account with cashfree.
Switch to test environment.
Click on Verification Suite. Where you can try Bank Account Verification provided by cashfree. But in test environment it gives correct response to only specific bank accounts. Test Bank Accounts
Check the API docs before moving on to SDK. Yeah, cashfree has SDK
Cashfree made developers life simple by providing Bank Validation Integration Kit for Node
Finally, from the verification suite you need to generate API Keys and whitelist IP address in Access Control. To use them in the code.