Access and Loop External Datasource with Apify Puppeteer Scraper - puppeteer

Question

The Apify Puppeteer Scraper does not expose jquery in the context object. I need to access an external JSON data source within the Puppeteer Scraper pageFunction and then loop over one of the nodes. Here is what I would do if jquery was available:
$.get(urlAPI, function(data) {
$.each(data.feed.entry, function(index, value) {
var url = value.URL;

Answer 1

As the handlePageFunction runs in node js context, there is no jQuery. You can easily include jQuery into page.evaluate function using Apify SDK.
async function pageFunction(context) {
const { page, request, log, Apify } = context;
await Apify.utils.puppeteer.injectJQuery(page);
const title = await page.evaluate(() => {
// There is jQuery include as we incleded it using injectJQuery method
return $('title').text()
});
return {
title,
}
}
EDIT: Using requestAsBrowser.
async function pageFunction(context) {
const { page, request, log, Apify } = context;
const response = await Apify.utils.requestAsBrowser({ url: "http://example.com" });
const data = JSON.parse(response.body);
return {
data,
}
}

Answer 2

You don't need JQuery (you can if you are familiar with it) to access an external resource.
Usually, we extract external data via common libraries like request or Apify's own httpRequest from a standalone actor. Unfortunately, Puppeteer Scraper doesn't allow usage of libraries (only dynamically downloaded which is probably overkill).
I would just use a modern fetch browser call. It is nicer than JQuery's AJAX and doesn't require inject.
async function pageFunction(context) {
const { page, request, log, Apify } = context;
const json = await page.evaluate(() => {
// There is jQuery include as we incleded it using injectJQuery method
return await fetch('http://my-json-url.com').then((resp) => resp.json())
});
// Process the JSON
}