357218 - Editor:Midas. We need a method to get TextNode at caret's position.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[Manuel Vázquez Acosta]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060921 Ubuntu/dapper-security Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060921 Ubuntu/dapper-security Firefox/1.5.0.7

We need a method that rapidly we us the TextNode where the caret is positioned. Something like textNodeAtCaret() would be nice.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Manuel Vázquez Acosta]

More on why we need this feature.

JITIR agents [1] could be built on top of this kind of functionality. A JITIR like Remembrance Agent would be a very nice feature for some CMS.

Currently, MSHTML "supports" what they call "Markup Services" and "Display Services", through interfaces IMarkupServices and IDisplayServices.

Although none of those interfaces are "scriptable" (they don't inherit from IDispatch), we have create an automation object we can put inside HTML to by-pass this restriction. Our object has only one method: elementAtCaret(doc) which receives an IHTMLDocument reference (the document with designMode set to On) and returns the element in which the caret is positioned.


I'm willing to work on this feature, though I have little experience with C programming, and none with the mozilla code base. I'm reading lots of docs on http://developer.mozilla.org/. Any ideas where I should start?

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References

[1] http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part2/rhodes.pdf

Comment 2

[Manuel Vázquez Acosta]

There's actually a way to do this:

s = document.getSelection()
r = s.getRangeAt(0);
textNodeAtCaret = r.commonAncesorContainer;