My PWA shows up in the share tray of my Android device, but when sharing to it the text doesn't show in the query params. How can I find out why?

Question

I have the following snippet on my web manifest manifest.webmanifest:

  "share_target": {
    "action": "/",
    "method": "GET",
    "params": {
      "url": "dirtyurl",
      "title": "title",
      "text": "bodyText"
    }
  }

So I'd expect that when a user selects the app in the share tray I'd get something like https://mywebsite.com/?dirtyurl=someurl&title=titleofarticle&bodyText=textofsomething, right? But when I display window.location.href on the website I get just https://mywebsite.com/.

Since this is an PWA installed on Android, I can't really see the dev tools to see if any error was posted. And for some reason the app doesn't show on the Windows 11 share tray at all so I cannot check on my computer's debug tools.

So, why is the Web Share Target API property not working as intended? I have been trying to follow the MDN guide here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/share_target but I can't find any reason why the URL isnt being populated as it should.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I've been struggling with the same problem and what kind of worked for me is having manifest part like this:

"share_target": {
    "action": "/Link/SharedLink/",
    "method": "GET",
    "params": {
        "title": "name",
        "text": "description"
    }
}

Where action is my controller method.

And my controller is like this:

public ActionResult SharedLink(string name, string description)
{
    ViewBag.Name = name;  // this will contain page title
    ViewBag.Description = description;  // this will contain page URL
    return View("SharedLink");
}

I don't know why there is an apparent mix-up with the names, but that's what worked.