Retrieving the last post title from Beamer

Upon integrating the Beamer widget in your application, you might have noticed a tooltip appearing over the HTML element you bound to it whenever a new post is published. This feature isn't mentioned in the documentation as far as I can tell, which also implies it cannot be disabled. However, there is a way to do so in JavaScript, and even use the last post title any other way you see fit, even though this information isn't provided to you initially!

The window.Beamer object exposes the ajax method, used by Beamer to request data from its backend: this method is used, among other things, to retrieve the last post title and display it in the aforementioned tooltip. One can use that to their own advantage, and override the method as follows:

let lastPostTitle;

const ajax = window.Beamer.ajax; // keep a reference to the original method...



window.Beamer.ajax = (url, callback) => {

  ajax(url, response => { // ...and call it ourselves

    try {

      // Grab the info for later use if it is available

      lastPostTitle = JSON.parse(response).lastPostTitle || "";

    } catch (e) {} // fail silently otherwise



    callback(response);

  });

};

Finally, we can make sure the tooltip is never shown by replacing the method displaying it with a no-op function:

window.Beamer.showLastPostTitle = () => {};