DocumentFragment

DocumentFragment is a "lightweight" or "minimal" Document object. It is very common to want to be able to extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new fragment of a document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object which can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node for this purpose. While it is true that a Document object could fulfill this role, a Document object can potentially be a heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for this is a very lightweight object. DocumentFragment is such an object.

Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children of another Node -- may take DocumentFragment objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the DocumentFragment being moved to the child list of this node.

The children of a DocumentFragment node are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of the document. DocumentFragment nodes do not need to be well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow the rules imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple top nodes). For example, a DocumentFragment might have only one child and that child node could be a Text node. Such a structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.

When a DocumentFragment is inserted into a Document (or indeed any other Node that may take children) the children of the DocumentFragment and not the DocumentFragment itself are inserted into the Node. This makes the DocumentFragment very useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the DocumentFragment acts as the parent of these nodes so that the user can use the standard methods from the Node interface, such as Node.insertBefore and Node.appendChild.

@safe
interface DocumentFragment : Node

Inherited Members

From Node

nodeType
NodeType nodeType [@property getter]

A code representing the type of the underlying object.

nodeName
DOMString nodeName [@property getter]

The name of this node, depending on its type.

localName
DOMString localName [@property getter]

Returns the local part of the qualified name of this node.

prefix
DOMString prefix [@property getter]
DOMString prefix [@property setter]

The namespace prefix of this node, or null if it is unspecified. When it is defined to be null, setting it has no effect, including if the node is read-only. Note that setting this attribute, when permitted, changes the nodeName attribute, which holds the qualified name, as well as the tagName and name attributes of the Element and Attr interfaces, when applicable. Setting the prefix to null makes it unspecified, setting it to an empty string is implementation dependent. Note also that changing the prefix of an attribute that is known to have a default value, does not make a new attribute with the default value and the original prefix appear, since the namespaceURI and localName do not change. For nodes of any type other than ELEMENT and ATTRIBUTE and nodes created with a DOM Level 1 method, such as createElement from the Document interface, this is always null.

namespaceURI
DOMString namespaceURI [@property getter]

The namespace URI of this node, or null if it is unspecified. This is not a computed value that is the result of a namespace lookup based on an examination of the namespace declarations in scope. It is merely the namespace URI given at creation time. For nodes of any type other than ELEMENT and ATTRIBUTE and nodes created with a DOM Level 1 method, such as Document.createElement, this is always null.

baseURI
DOMString baseURI [@property getter]

The absolute base URI of this node or null if the implementation wasn't able to obtain an absolute URI

nodeValue
DOMString nodeValue [@property getter]
DOMString nodeValue [@property setter]

The value of this node, depending on its type.

textContent
DOMString textContent [@property getter]

Returns the text content, if there's any.

textContent
DOMString textContent [@property setter]

Sets the text content, it there's any.

parentNode
Node parentNode [@property getter]

The parent of this node. All nodes, except Attr, Document, DocumentFragment, Entity, and Notation may have a parent. However, if a node has just been created and not yet added to the tree, or if it has been removed from the tree, this is null.

childNodes
NodeList childNodes [@property getter]

A NodeList that contains all children of this node. If there are no children, this is a NodeList containing no nodes.

firstChild
Node firstChild [@property getter]

The first child of this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

lastChild
Node lastChild [@property getter]

The last child of this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

previousSibling
Node previousSibling [@property getter]

The node immediately preceding this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

nextSibling
Node nextSibling [@property getter]

The node immediately following this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

ownerDocument
Document ownerDocument [@property getter]

The Document object associated with this node. This is also the Document object used to create new nodes. When this node is a Document or a DocumentType which is not used with any Document yet, this is null.

attributes
NamedNodeMap attributes [@property getter]

A NamedNodeMap containing the attributes of this node (if it is an Element) or null otherwise.

hasAttributes
bool hasAttributes()

Returns whether this node (if it is an element) has any attributes.

insertBefore
Node insertBefore(Node newChild, Node refChild)

Inserts the node newChild before the existing child node refChild. If refChild is null, insert newChild at the end of the list of children. If newChild is a DocumentFragment object, all of its children are inserted, in the same order, before refChild. If the newChild is already in the tree, it is first removed.

replaceChild
Node replaceChild(Node newChild, Node oldChild)

Replaces the child node oldChild with newChild in the list of children, and returns the oldChild node. If newChild is a DocumentFragment object, oldChild is replaced by all of the DocumentFragment children, which are inserted in the same order. If the newChild is already in the tree, it is first removed.

removeChild
Node removeChild(Node oldChild)

Removes the child node indicated by oldChild from the list of children, and returns it.

appendChild
Node appendChild(Node newChild)
Undocumented in source.
hasChildNodes
bool hasChildNodes()

Returns whether this node has any children.

cloneNode
Node cloneNode(bool deep)

Returns a duplicate of this node, i.e., serves as a generic copy constructor for nodes. The duplicate node has no parent (parentNode is null) and no user data. User data associated to the imported node is not carried over. However, if any UserData handlers has been specified along with the associated data these handlers will be called with the appropriate parameters before this method returns.

isSameNode
bool isSameNode(Node other)
Undocumented in source.
isEqualNode
bool isEqualNode(Node arg)
Undocumented in source.
normalize
void normalize()

Puts all Text nodes in the full depth of the sub-tree underneath this Node, including attribute nodes, into a "normal" form where only structure (e.g., elements, comments, processing instructions, CDATA sections, and entity references) separates Text nodes, i.e., there are neither adjacent Text nodes nor empty Text nodes. This can be used to ensure that the DOM view of a document is the same as if it were saved and re-loaded.

isSupported
bool isSupported(string feature, string version_)

Tests whether the DOM implementation implements a specific feature and that feature is supported by this node.

getFeature
Object getFeature(string feature, string version_)
Undocumented in source.
getUserData
UserData getUserData(string key)

Retrieves the object associated to a key on a this node. The object must first have been set to this node by calling setUserData with the same key.

setUserData
UserData setUserData(string key, UserData data, UserDataHandler handler)

Associate an object to a key on this node. The object can later be retrieved from this node by calling getUserData with the same key.

compareDocumentPosition
BitFlags!DocumentPosition compareDocumentPosition(Node other)

Compares the reference node, i.e. the node on which this method is being called, with a node, i.e. the one passed as a parameter, with regard to their position in the document and according to the document order.

lookupPrefix
DOMString lookupPrefix(DOMString namespaceURI)

Look up the prefix associated to the given namespace URI, starting from this node. The default namespace declarations are ignored by this method.

lookupNamespaceURI
DOMString lookupNamespaceURI(DOMString prefix)

Look up the namespace URI associated to the given prefix, starting from this node.

isDefaultNamespace
bool isDefaultNamespace(DOMString namespaceURI)

This method checks if the specified namespaceURI is the default namespace or not.

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