Genesys Widgets Deployment Guide

This guide provides the steps required to instrument your website with Genesys Widgets.

Audience

This document is for website developers who are in charge of website code. You must have knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Cookies

Genesys Widgets uses cookies to store non-sensitive data in the browser. These cookies are used to restore a chat session, to track the state of the UI, to store a user's decision, and more. The end-user's browser must allow cookies for Genesys Widgets to operate properly.

Important

No personally identifiable information (PII) is ever stored in cookies, local storage, or session storage by Genesys Widgets

Sub-domains

Normally, cookies can not be transferred between sub-domains of a website unless they are configured to do so. Genesys Widgets automatically detects the domain of the host site and configures all cookies to be transferable between sub-domains. For example, you could start a chat on www.testsite.com and restore that chat session on store.testsite.com, support.testsite.com, or portal.testsite.com.

Cookie support in test environments

Genesys Widgets uses special cookies that persist across sub-domains. This is a critical feature for plugins like WebChat that need to restore an active chat session while navigating around a website. The side effect of using this type of cookie is they won't work when using test environment domain names such as "localhost" or an IP address. You must use a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) such as "localhost.com" or any other variant that can be identified as a domain name. Cookies will also fail to work if you run the test site as an HTML file path directly in the browser.

One workaround is to update your system's hosts file to create an FQDN alias for "localhost", your test environment's name, or an IP address.

Example

  127.0.0.1       localhost
  127.0.0.1       localhost.com

A fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) such as "localhost.com" or any other variant that can be identified as a domain name is not mandatory but recommended. These cookies will also work when using test environment domain names such as "localhost" or an IP address.

How can I deploy Genesys Widgets?

We support two deployment methods:

• Lazy-Loading—Lazy-Loading breaks the JavaScript bundle apart into individual plugin files and loads them into the page only as you need them. This is the preferred method of deploying Genesys Widgets.

• All-In-One—The All-In-One method is the "classic" method of deploying Genesys Widgets. In this method, you have one JavaScript file and one CSS file that contain all plugins and resources.

Deploying Genesys Widgets (Lazy-Loading)

Files Used

• widgets/cxbus.min.js
• widgets/plugins/widgets-core.min.js
• widgets/plugins/*.*

A good starting point is the following script:

<script src="widgets/cxbus.min.js" onload="javascript:CXBus.configure({debug:true,pluginsPath:'build/plugins/'});CXBus.loadFile('path/to/widgets.config.js').done(function(){CXBus.loadPlugin('widgets-core')});"></script>

This script does the following:

1. Loads cxbus.min.js. This makes the global CXBus instance available.
2. Configures CXBus to turn on debug logging and set the path to the Widgets plugin folder.
3. Load your configuration file, widgets.config.js. (This is an imaginary file. You must create it).
4. Loads widgets-core, the core Genesys Widgets library.

Use this script as a starting point and customize it as needed.

Remember that your configuration can be defined inline on the page or loaded in as a separate file (as shown in this script).

Important

Whichever method you choose, you must ensure your configuration is in the page before you load widgets-core. Otherwise, widgets-core cannot read the configuration.

Important

Refer to this article for help configuring Genesys Widgets.

On-Demand Lazy-Loading

Genesys Widgets is designed to load plugins into the page on-demand as you use the product. For example, if you call the command WebChat.open, CXBus fetches the webchat.min.js plugin from the plugins/ folder and loads it into the page. Any WebChat command triggers it to load. Likewise, WebChat calls WebChatService commands, thus CXBus loads webchatservice.min.js into the page as well.

Preloading Plugins

In some cases, you might not want to load plugins on-demand, or the demand is to load them at startup. A good example is SideBar. You probably want this plugin to appear on the screen immediately so the customer can use it. To make this possible, you can specify which plugins you want to preload at startup in your configuration.

    
    _genesys.widgets.main.preload = [

        "sidebar"
    ];

You may specify as many plugins as you want in the preload list. The plugins load in order after you load Widgets Core.

All plugin names are lower-case. Please refer to the file names in the plugins/ folder. For example, to preload webchat.min.js, specify webchat, the first part of the file name.

You may find other plugins or features of plugins that necessitate preloading.

Deploying Genesys Widgets (All-in-One)

Files Used

• widgets/widgets.min.css
• widgets/widgets.min.js

A good starting point is the following script:

<script src-"widgets/widgets.config.js"></script>
<script src="widgets/widgets.min.js"></script>
<link id="genesys-widgets-styles" href="http://www.yourhost.com/path/to/widgets.min.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/>

First, you must define your configuration for Genesys Widgets. You can do this inline on the page by using a script tag, or you can store it in a separate file and load it in before widgets.min.js. In the script example above, we assume your configuration is stored in another file. You must create the widgets.config.js file for this script to function properly.

Important

Whichever method you choose, you must ensure your configuration is in the page before you load widgets.min.js. Otherwise, widgets.min.js cannot read the configuration.

Important

Refer to this article for help configuring Genesys Widgets.