Wechat development series 5 – embedded your UI5 application

  • Wechat development series 1 – setup your development environment
  • Wechat development series 2 – development Q&A service using nodejs
  • Wechat development series 3 – Trigger C4C Account creation in Wechat app
  • Wechat development series 4 – Send C4C Data change notification to Wechat app
  • Wechat development series 5 – embedded your UI5 application to Wechat app
  • Wechat development series 6 – Retrieve Wechat User info via oAuth2 and display it in UI5 application
  • Wechat development series 7 – use Redis to store Wechat conversation history
  • Wechat development series 8 – Map integration
If you have your UI5 application already running smoothly on some cloud platform like SCP or Heroku, it is then very easy to embed it in the Wechat app. The typical scenario is, when a Wechat user has subscribed your Wechat subscription account, he/she will see some available meu inside the Wechat app defined by you.
In example below, “UI5” is top level menu and “Jerry List” is sub menu item.
You can define the logic to react to the menu item click, for example opening your UI5 application runnming on cloud platform.
When you click the “Jerry List” menu, the UI5 application is opened by a built-in browser inside the Wechat app.
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Here below is implementation detail

1. Create your custom Wechat menu via postman:
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  • url: https://api.weixin.qq.com/cgi-bin/menu/create?access_token=4_otQpSMfcwvmcL-T-DovhnozCAYCpy6wiKU3t4LUeZcQOF_i85a9NbpKpx7seLyEeHlrxl1rtlztL0miJthojqlqHqJArx7sm5OUdnsAupPpUwGr2EWljdJrLlrAVDNcADACKU
  • http type: post
  • payload:
{ "button":[ { "name":"UI5", "sub_button":[{ "type": "view", "name": "Jerry List", "url": "https://wechatjerry.herokuapp.com/ui5" },{ "type": "click", "name": "Other UI5 application", "key": "dataQuery" }] } ] }
The access token could be retrieved by http get via url: https://api.weixin.qq.com/cgi-bin/token?grant_type=client_credential&appid=&secret=.
2. since in previous step the UI5 application url https://wechatjerry.herokuapp.com/ui5 is configured to the button “Jerry List”, so you have to ensure this url works correctly. Deploy your UI5 application to a given cloud platform. You can refer to this blog Step by step to host your UI5 application in Herokufor detail step.
In my example my UI5 application is located in a sub folder “webapp” under root folder wechat,
And the mapping of url ui5 to this folder is done in my nodejs server:
var express = require('express'); var app = express(); app.use('/ui5', express.static(process.cwd() + '/webapp'));
After that you could test the scenario in your Wechat app.