Retrieve state from a JSON file I've pointed to

[chourroutm]

Our anti-phishing tool for emails usually breaks very long URLs and link shorteners also usually have character limits, as mentioned in https://caveconnectome.github.io/sections/users-interactive.html#neuroglancer-stateslinks

I am aware of the link shortener embedded in https://spelunker.cave-explorer.org/ (https://caveconnectome.github.io/sections/users-interactive.html#websites) but wonder whether this idea would make sense: we'd point to a JSON file that would then be resolved as the new JSON state upon first load. For security reasons, if the file is not a valid JSON, the resolution would fail.

E.g. https://neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!{"json_state_url":"gs://my-bucket-id/state.json"} or https://neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!{"json_state_url":"https://github.com/chourroutm/saved-neuroglancer-states/blob/main/00001.json"} (handy for versioning)

If you can point me to the .ts file that resolves the state, I can make a PR with that functionality.

[fcollman]

This already works..

https://neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!gs:/mybucket/mystate.json

i will add this to the doc. Your GitHub link won’t work because that url is to a GitHub page and not directly to the json, but the static raw URL would or if it were published via GitHub pages

[chourroutm]

Wow amazing, thanks @fcollman!

[chourroutm]

I got it to work with the https://raw.githubusercontent.com/... links, which are token-protected when the repo is private. I can either use the latest version or a specific commit.