Serialize to HTML

[olanod]

Would it be possible to serialize a tree as an html string or some mechanism to create a dodrio dom in server side and serve it via http?

[fitzgen]

Yep! I've been intending to support this sometime in the future.

The first step would be to add a to_html_string method on Node:

impl<'a> Node<'a> {
    fn to_html_string(&self) -> String { ... }
}

And the second step would be a way to create an empty RenderContext for use in contexts outside the DOM.

Happy to give some further pointers if you (or anyone else) is interested in contributing this.

[sepiropht]

I'm want to try it ! It is possible ?

[fitzgen]

@sepiropht sure thing!

To expand a bit on what I wrote above:

I think actually rather than making this a method on Node, it should be a function that takes any generic R: Render. It would internally create an empty rendering context, render the component into it, and then stringify the resulting node recursively by passing around a mutable reference to the string that is being built up, and matching on each different kind of node.

Here is a sketch:

pub fn html_string<R>(component: &R) -> String
where
    R: Render,
{
    // Create an empty rendering context. You'll need to create this `empty`
    // method.
    let cx = &mut RenderContext::empty();

    // Render the component in the new context.
    let node = component.render(cx);

    // Stringify the node into an HTML string.
    let mut s = String::new();
    html_string_recursive(cx, &mut s, self);
    return s;

    fn html_string_recursive(cx: &mut RenderContext, s: &mut String, node: &Node) {
        match node.kind {
            NodeKind::Text(ref t) => s.push_str(t.text),
            NodeKind::Element(ref e) => {
                // TODO: push the HTML-formatted element to `s`...

                // Recursively stringify the children.
                for c in &e.children {
                    html_string(cx, s, c);
                }

                // TODO: push the close tag to `s`...
            }
            NodeKind::Cached(ref c) => {
                // TODO: use cx.cached_set.get to get the underlying cached node
                // and then call `html_string_recursive` on it...
            }
        }
    }
}

[sepiropht]

Ok thanks! I will look at this as soon as possible!