CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptc#json
Jon
Jon

Reputation: 636

Assign a raw HTML tag to a JavaScript variable

I'm working on an existing ASP.Net application and came across an interesting piece of JavaScript that I've been wondering about.

A few variables are being declared as literals, and they aren't in strings. For example, something like this is done:

<script type="text/javascript">  
    var jsonData = <asp:Literal ID="MyJsonObject" runat="server" />;
    ......
</script>

And in the server side code(C#), these tags are actually being altered from a JsonTextWriter similarly to this:

var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
var stringWriter = new StringWriter(stringBuilder);

using (var jsonWriter = new JsonTextWriter(stringWriter))
{
    jsonWriter.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;

    jsonWriter.WriteStartObject();
    jsonWriter.WritePropertyName("someProperty");
    jsonWriter.WriteValue("someValue");
    jsonWriter.WriteEndObject();
}

MyJsonObject.Value = stringBuilder.ToString();

This in turn is causing the jsonData variable to be able to be used as a Json object in the client side code.

What I've noticed is, if I put single quotes around the tag and change it to:

<script type="text/javascript">  
    var jsonData = '<asp:Literal ID="MyJsonObject" runat="server" />';
    ......
</script>

This doesn't work as it's no longer coming across as a Json object, but as an actual string. However, as I would expect, when it's just a plain tag, I'm receiving several syntax errors from Visual Studio.

So my question is:

Is this something that's generally acceptable or should I avoid keeping things like this around? Yeah, it works, but it doesn't look right to me.

I've found a few different questions that seem to be related here, but none seem to provide any insight on my particular situation.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 606

Answers (1)

Shotgun Ninja
Shotgun Ninja

Reputation: 2540

In short: Yes, this looks acceptable. That appears to be one of the intended use-cases of the <asp:Literal> tag. Since you're writing a Javascript object literal, you won't even need the single-quotes, since that will change how the code works.

The thing to note is that <asp:Literal> isn't an HTML tag, and therefore will not make it to the user as it is. The <asp:Literal> tag gets pre-processed by ASP.NET before the page is sent to the user (since you have runat="server" specified); therefore, it will be processed regardless of surrounding content and replaced entirely with the resolved string value. Thus, your rendered page will be transformed (on the server-side) from this:

var jsonData = <asp:Literal ID="MyJsonObject" runat="server" />;

to this:

var jsonData = {
    "someProperty" : "someValue"
};

This is a good way of transferring rich data constructed on the server-side into the client-side Javascript without having to write out raw Javascript to the page.

If you wanted a JSON-formatted string instead, then doing what you're doing and calling JSON.stringify(jsonData) afterwards would be your best bet.

Upvotes: 2

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