React: how to load and render external html file?

Question

I building a small blog app using React and Redux. The blog show Posts page with title, author, tags and description of a post. When clicking on title or "read more" button, I want to load and render an HTML file with corresponding post from a local project's data folder with all the posts.

Redux is managing the state of the blog, loading initial posts.json file with 8 different posts, including htmlPath for the corresponding html file in the data folder.

Do you want to render the external html static and "as is" or is there any need to "parse" it somehow or make it interact with React (e.g component states) somehow? — Chris
Just render it, lets say I click on post's title "Hello World" and get all the post rendered from file hello-world.html — Intermundos
People will be pulling their hair at this one. It does not sound right. However, one starts to build app in React, expecting wonders, then gets to a point where one wants to do something that was easy, simple, unambiguous, straightforward to do with PHP. — Rolf

Chris Chris · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-18T13:12:18

The way I see it is that you have 2 problems to solve here. The first is how to set the innerHTML of an element in React. The other is how to get a specific HTML to render depending on a given variable (e.g the current route, the input of a textfield, etc).

1. Setting the `innerHTML` of an element

You can do this with the dangerouslySetInnerHTML prop. As the name suggests it sets the innerHTML of the said element to whatever you specify... and yes, the "dangerously" is accurate as it's intended to make you think twice before using this feature.

The Official Documentation reads as follows:

Improper use of the innerHTML can open you up to a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. Sanitizing user input for display is notoriously error-prone, and failure to properly sanitize is one of the leading causes of web vulnerabilities on the internet.

Check out this Demo or the snippet below.

var Demo = React.createClass({

  getInitialState: function() {
    return {showExternalHTML: false};
  },
  
  render: function() {
    return (
      <div>
        <button onClick={this.toggleExternalHTML}>Toggle Html</button>
        {this.state.showExternalHTML ? <div>
          <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={this.createMarkup()} ></div>
        </div> : null}
      </div>
    );
  },
  
  toggleExternalHTML: function() {
    this.setState({showExternalHTML: !this.state.showExternalHTML});
  },
  
  createMarkup: function() { 
    return {__html: '<div class="ext">Hello!</div>'};
  }

});

ReactDOM.render(
  <Demo />,
  document.getElementById('container')
);

.ext {
  margin-top: 20px;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100px;
  background: green;
  color: white;
  font-size: 40px;
  text-align: center;
  line-height: 100px;
}

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.1.0/react.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.1.0/react-dom.min.js"></script>
<div id="container"></div>

2. Fetching the HTML from an external source

Note that the above example does not actually get the HTML from an external file, but is entered directly as a string.

One simple way to do dynamically fetch a choose a specific file would be to let your backend (e.g php) read the file from a local folder, parse the text, and send it back through an AJAX request.

Example

//Your React component
fetchExternalHTML: function(fileName) {
  Ajax.getJSON('/myAPI/getExternalHTML/' + fileName).then(
    response => {
      this.setState({
        extHTML: response
      });
    }, err => {
      //handle your error here
    }
  );
}

React: how to load and render external html file?

4 Answers

1. Setting the innerHTML of an element

2. Fetching the HTML from an external source

Example

1. Setting the `innerHTML` of an element