Product brief #7:
simpler SDK v4, docs portal, production-ready MQL

This brief covered three releases: Microlink SDK 4.0 with fewer, more unified card parameters and a rewritten build, a documentation portal built into the site, and the Microlink Query Language (MQL), which was now production ready.

If you used the SDK, v4 was a major version that renamed or removed four card parameters. The release notes on GitHub list every change.

SDK 4.0 had two goals: simplify some connector-specific parameters, and produce smarter bundles. Both prepared the SDK for the next step, bringing audio support, which the API already had, to the SDK level.

/* before */
<Microlink reverse video />

/* after */
<Microlink direction='ltr' media='video' />

The Microlink SDK renders previews for any site on the internet, so over time we had added specific parameters for each new use case. With a wider view of the whole API surface, the same cards could be expressed with fewer, more general parameters, as the snippet above shows. The changes in v4 were:

The build system decides how the library is bundled for each way you consume it, and v4 rewrote it from scratch. It produced both official connectors, React and Vanilla.

The React connector was bundled for CommonJS and ESM, the two entry points declared in its package.json. The build then took that ESM bundle as the input for the Vanilla connector, which it exported as a Universal Module Definition (UMD) bundle for the browser.

The new documentation portal gave everything involved with Microlink one entry point: the documentation itself, but also examples and code snippets. It was integrated into microlink.io and built with the same visual elements as our Design System.

Every documentation section also had an Edit This Page on GitHub link in its footer. Anyone who spotted a mistake or a missing example could suggest a change to that page on GitHub directly from the footer link.

import mql from '@microlink/mql'
const { status, data } = await mql('https://microlink.io')
console.log(data)

The Microlink Query Language (MQL) replaced Custom Rules, as announced in our Master Plan for 2019. With this release, MQL was production ready.

The @microlink/mql npm package is a JavaScript HTTP client on top of the Microlink API. As the snippet shows, one mql() call with a URL returns the response status and the extracted data. The package also runs directly in the browser, where its size is 4KB.

The first MQL documentation pages explained how rules are defined. The next items on the plan were documentation at the API layer, more practical examples, and a separate site to use as an MQL playground.

To move a card to v4, replace reverse with direction, video with media='video', and image with media, then drop noFetch wherever you call setData with an object. The SDK docs cover each parameter, and npm install @microlink/mql adds the MQL client to any JavaScript project.