An Ad Hoc Approach to Passing Elements from Blazor to JavaScript
In a previous column I described an architectural, design-pattern-based approach to integrating JavaScript and Blazor code. However, if you just need to pass one element from your Blazor page to some JavaScript functions, that approach might be overkill.
Instead of adopting my approach, when you declare an HTML element in Blazor, you can add a ref attribute to the element in order to assign a "Blazor-accessible" name to the element. This HTML, for example, assigns the name mytextbox to a textbox:
<input type="text" id="atextbox" ref="mytextbox" value="Peter" />
You can now, in your Blazor code, declare a field as an ElementRef object with the same name you used in the ref attribute -- Blazor will automatically bind that ElementRef field to the HTML element. You can't do much with an ElementRef variable in Blazor ... except pass it to a JavaScript function. This code, for example, passes the textbox to a JavaScript function called SetName:
@functions
{
ElementRef mytextbox;
protected override Task OnInitAsync()
{
await JSRuntime.Current.InvokeAsync<string>("SetName", mytextbox );
Within the JavaScript function you can treat the element as an HtmlElement and access its properties. As an example, this JavaScript code sets the textbox's value property to "Vogel":
function SetName(textbox) {
textbox.value = "Vogel";
}
Once you have the element you can, of course, also use it with jQuery. This code also sets the element's value to "Vogel" but does it using jQuery's val function:
function SetName(textbox) {
$(textbox).val("Vogel");
}
Posted by Peter Vogel on 12/06/2018