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Remember Model Dialog, that's surely brings back some memories , it was easy back in the days a simple way to instantiate a new SP.UI.ModalDialog  with the appropriate options and then show the dialog and that's it!

Of course we had to make sure that  we append the isDlg=true to the url querystring when showing a SharePoint form.

Also we used to make sure that header and footer are adhering to the branding guideline so when we customize the heck out of the SharePoint master page (prior to SharePoint 2013) we didn't get the funny header and footer ruining our Dialog box.

The other bit which was happening for us is when the SharePoint form (whether it's item display or edit) when we press cancel or OK buttons, the Modal dialog disappear magically.

So let's take SPFx, how can we replicate the same functionality with the simplest possible approach

BaseDialog & DialogContent to the rescure

BaseDialog is an abstract class wrapped and delivered to us as part of @microsoft/sp-dialog  package, by simply extending this dialog class and implement render method you can construct the content of your dialog (there are heaps of other method to extend and customise the behavior of the dialog but this post is about the simplest Iframe dialog ever)

In our case,  let's implement a new react component called IframeContent , which acts as a container for our iframe. This simple react component contains a single root DialogContent component which is imported from office-ui-fabric-react package. The IframeContent component has a single child element which is the iframe HTML tag.


The second component is even simpler , which is the Dialog itself which  implements the BaseDialog the most significant bit of code is the render method which basically does nothing apart from having a single instance of the previously created dialog content.


So far so good, but what if we need to replicate the magic we used to have (hiding the dialog upon clicking ok or cancel of an OTB classic SharePoint form).

The answer is simply using the same old mechanism , the old forms send an event to the parent window called "CloseDialog" so what we need to do is simple, let our React component listen to the event and call the close method.

Full code of the IframeDialog component is below
A more comprehensive implementation with different building blocks can be found at the following github repo https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-controls-react