April 3, 2024

TLDR

• We want to give our users a better experience when accessing the app across multiple chains

• To do this, we’ve changed how we handle URLs in the Fractal App to align with how Safe app handles them

• This URL specifies both 1) DAO address as a ‘query parameter’ and 2) The Chain as a ‘Prefix’ to this address

• This means our users (and the app via error messages) will find it easier to identify what has gone wrong if our Fractal DAO or Safe isn’t loading correctly.

• When will this happen - this will get pushed to production around the 8th/9th April

• Impact - we’ve worked hard to reformat your old URLs… but saying that we had to rely on some assumptions (listed here)

  <aside> 👉 If you attempt to load prior URL /daos/0x123 (whether from a bookmark you have saved in your browser, or clicking a link from a blog post, or typing it into your url bar manually) Fractal will redirect to either/or

  • /home?dao=eth:0x123
  • /home?dao=sep:0x123  depending on whatever network you were last connected to in the app.

  </aside>

Changes to URL Structure

Safes, in general, are identified by both a network and an address. Safes (and all smart contracts) are deployed to specific networks after all. However, in the Fractal app, we have not been fully identifying these Safes in the URL. There was no network specified!

That means that when attempting to load up a Safe, we took the address from the URL and paired it with the network the app was connected to and hoped for the best. This led to a not very great user experience, because generic errors would pop up if the app was connected to, say, Sepolia, and you are trying to load up a Mainnet Safe.

So we’ve made some improvements here, to bring clarity to both the user and the app.

New URL

We’ve made a breaking change to the URL structure. Instead of your Mainnet DAO’s Dashboard living at /daos/0x123, it now lives at /home?dao=eth:0x123. There are two things to comment on here:

1. We’ve moved the address from the URL “path”, into a URL “query parameter”.
2. We’ve included a new prefix to the address identifier, to specify which network the Safe lives on.

Some improvements for both the user and the app, with this new structure, include:

• Users can now fully qualify in the URL which exact Safe they’re attempting to load.
• If the app is giving an error, users can confirm (via the URL) that they’re attempting to load the correct Safe, given the network and address.
• The app can give clearer error messages to the user if there are problems:
  • If the app is on a different network than the network for the Safe that the user is attempting to load.
  • If there is a problem with the format of the dao query parameter.
  • If there is an actual problem loading the Safe on the given network (for example, if the address is not a Safe!)