Plugins

Plugins are a way to specify additional initalization logic that is executed by the AdvertisingProvider component.

It is an advanced feature that you probably won't need.

A bit of background why this may be useful:

At eBay, we use react-prebid to render ads for our German online community MOTOR-TALK.

For MOTOR-TALK, we render our React layout both on the client side and on the server side to make our website search engine friendly.

We use Redux for state management. Our Redux state must be serializable, so that we can pass it from the server to the client for state hydration.

This means the Redux state cannot have any functions in it, since those cannot be serialized. It is generally considered an anti-pattern to put functions in the Redux state.

The problem now is that our advertising configuration is also stored in the Redux state.

For some bidders, we configure Prebid with a function that converts the currency of the bids' CPM (cost per mille) from US$ to EUR. But we cannot store this function in our config, because of the serialization.

This is why we came up with the plugin mechanism:

In addition to the config prop, the AdvertisingProvider has a plugins prop that allows us to pass this additional configuration. It looks like this:

const plugins = [
  {
    setupPrebid() {
      if (!this.config.usdToEurRate) {
        return;
      }
      window.pbjs.bidderSettings = {
        appnexus: {
          bidCpmAdjustment(bidCpm) {
            return bidCpm * this.config.usdToEurRate;
          }
        }
      };
    }
  }
];

const config = {
    usdToEurRate: 0.8611,
    /* other config */
};

function App() {
    return (
        <AdvertisingProvider config={config} plugins={plugins}>
            {/* other components */}
        </AdvertisingProvider>
    )
}

• The plugin code is executed when the AdvertisingProvider sets up Prebid; this is specified through the name of the method chosen for the plugin function
• You can define multiple plugins, each plugin for one or more setup or initialization phases; valid names are:
  • setupGpt: initialization of GPT when AdvertisingProvider component mounts
  • displaySlots: immediately before googletag.display is called for each slot
  • setupPrebid: initialization of Prebid when AdvertisingProvider component mounts
  • teardownGpt: GPT is deactivated when AdvertisingProvider component unmounts
  • teardownPrebid: Prebid is deactivated when AdvertisingProvider component unmounts; this can be useful for stopping timers or intervals
• this in the scope of the callback refers to the advertising module that is used internally to manage to Prebid and GPT; this.config is the configuration you pass into the AdvertisingProvider component; in our example, we put the conversion rate from US$ to EUR in our config

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