Can we render a Blazor component as an independent DOM fragment, or somehow else consume it as a standard Web Component within a vanilla HTML/JS page?
This might be a naive question from the Blazor architectural standpoints. I am not a Blazor expert by far, but I think it can be a useful technique for incremental "brownfield" modernization of legacy web applications. I'm surprised this doesn't appear to be officially supported.
To illustrate, consider this simple web component example, which renders a custom element <date-info>:
// define a custom web component
customElements.define("date-info", class DateInfo extends HTMLElement {
constructor() {
super();
// create an "open" (vs "closed") shadow DOM,
// i.e., accessible to the outside JavaScript
this.attachShadow({ mode: "open" });
}
async connectedCallback() {
console.log(`${this.constructor.name}.${this.connectedCallback.name} called`);
// get the content from the server,
// this could be a Blazor component markup
try {
const response = await fetch("https://worldtimeapi.org/api/ip");
const data = await response.json();
const content = new Date(data.utc_datetime).toString();
this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = `<span>${content}</span>`;
}
catch(e) {
console.error(e);
const info = document.createTextNode(e.message);
this.shadowRoot.appendChild(info);
}
}
});<!-- use the web component -->
<p>Current time: <date-info/></p>Now, instead of fetching https://worldtimeapi.org/api/ip, I'd like to fetch and render a detached markup for a Blazor/Server component, e.g.:
@* this is a Blazor component *@
<p>@(DateTime.Now)</p>
Moreover, I'd expect this markup to remain functional and dynamic, i.e., the client-side DOM events and the server-side updates for this Blazor component to further propagate both ways, through the life cycle of the wrapping web component.
It's surely possible to make it a Blazor @page and load it into an iframe, but I'm rather looking to render it as a part of the outer page's DOM.
So far, I've come across this:
Apparently, that wasn't one of Blazor design goals back in 2018: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/16033.
Later Steve Sanderson created an (unofficial) library to test Blazor components in isolation, which in theory can be used to get a standalone Blazor component markup: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60457390/1768303.
Is it the best approach to tackle this problem, so far?
