Example actor showcasing running a user-provided function in a static-typed compiled language.

How does it work

1. Reads the input from disk or via Apify API
2. Extracts the page_function string from the input
3. Stores the page_function string to the disk
4. Spawns a system process using cargo to compile the page_function into a dynamic library
5. Dynamically links the library and converts the page_function into a regular Rust function. It must adhere to predefined input/output types.
6. The example code gets HTML from the input provided url and parses it into a document using the Scraper library
7. The user-provided page_function gets the document as an input parameter and returns a JSON Value type using the json macro

Page function

Page function can use a predefined set of Rust libraries, currently only the Scraper library and serde_json for JSON Value type are provided.

TODO

But technically, thanks to dynamic compiling, we can enable users to provide a list of libraries to be used in the page_function.

Example page_function

use serde_json::{Value,json};
use scraper::{Html, Selector};

fn selector_to_text(document: &Html, selector: &str) -> Option<String> {
    document
        .select(&Selector::parse(selector).unwrap())
        .next()
        .map(|el| el.text().next().unwrap().into() )
}

#[no_mangle]
pub fn page_function (document: &Html) -> Value { 
    println!("page_function starting");

    let title = selector_to_text(&document, "title");
    println!("extracted title: {:?}", title);

    let header = selector_to_text(&document, "h1");
    println!("extracted header: {:?}", header);

    let companies_using_apify = document
        .select(&Selector::parse(".Logos__container").unwrap())
        .next().unwrap()
        .select(&Selector::parse("img").unwrap())
        .map(|el| el.value().attr("alt").unwrap().to_string())
        .collect::<Vec<String>>();

    println!("extracted companies_using_apify: {:?}", companies_using_apify);

    let output = json!({
        "title": title,
        "header": header,
        "companies_using_apify": companies_using_apify,
    });
    println!("inside pageFunction output: {:?}", output);
    output
}