Supporting SSR scenarios

[kamranayub]

One of my motivations to use this is for using my .NET server as a runtime for my React frontend. In order to do that, I need to execute SSR code through Node.js in .NET and I think the two options right now are edge-js and node-api-dotnet.

I've completed a prototype of supporting React Router SSR with node-api-dotnet here:

https://github.com/kamranayub/dotnet-ssr

However, I did run into a few issues:

• Debugging doesn't work, since it's targeting net8.0 and there's an issue with that jsdom blows up on net 9 but works on net 8 #440
• You can't use the node-api-dotnet npm package vanilla within SSR context because the CLR host is already initialized Importing node-api-dotnet into node into a dotnet app #330

For the second issue, I've worked around it by patching the init.js manually and injecting a dotnetHost global, which works!

https://github.com/kamranayub/dotnet-ssr/blob/be9dc260c5cc23c31f037cc60e74872c7fd8d30a/web/patches/node-api-dotnet%2B0.9.15.patch

https://github.com/kamranayub/dotnet-ssr/blob/be9dc260c5cc23c31f037cc60e74872c7fd8d30a/src/server/NodeSsrHost.cs#L57-L71

I think this could be contributed back to the library, but not sure where/how to do that. I'm up for it if that would be accepted, I just need some guidance.

I haven't yet prototyped this with edge-js, I only know it also does in-proc communication -- what I don't know is if I can set it up like this so the SSR code can invoke .NET APIs, plus I love that this generates the typedefs which make this work great under Vite dev mode 🚀

To get that working, you need to rewrite the import paths at build time:

https://github.com/kamranayub/dotnet-ssr/blob/be9dc260c5cc23c31f037cc60e74872c7fd8d30a/web/vite.config.ts#L12-L65