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DOM_DocumentFragment Class Reference

Inheritance diagram for DOM_DocumentFragment:

List of all members.

Public Methods
Constructors and assignment operators
	DOM_DocumentFragment ()
	DOM_DocumentFragment (const DOM_DocumentFragment &other)
DOM_DocumentFragment &	operator= (const DOM_DocumentFragment &other)
DOM_DocumentFragment &	operator= (const DOM_NullPtr *val)
Destructor
	~DOM_DocumentFragment ()
Protected Methods
	DOM_DocumentFragment (DocumentFragmentImpl *)
Friends
class	DOM_Document
class	RangeImpl

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Detailed Description

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 fulfil 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 insertBefore() and appendChild().

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Constructor & Destructor Documentation

DOM_DocumentFragment::DOM_DocumentFragment (    )

Default constructor for DOM_DocumentFragment. The resulting object does not refer to an actual Document Fragment node; it will compare == to 0, and is similar to a null object reference variable in Java. It may subsequently be assigned to refer to an actual Document Fragment node. New document fragment nodes are created by DOM_Document::createDocumentFragment().

DOM_DocumentFragment::DOM_DocumentFragment (  const DOM_DocumentFragment &    other )

Copy constructor. Creates a new DOM_DocumentFragment that refers to the same underlying node as the original. See also DOM_Node::clone(), which will copy the actual Document fragment node, rather than just creating a new reference to the original node. Parameters: other  The object to be copied

DOM_DocumentFragment::~DOM_DocumentFragment (    )

Destructor. The object being destroyed is the reference object, not the underlying Comment node itself.

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Member Function Documentation

DOM_DocumentFragment & DOM_DocumentFragment::operator= (  const DOM_NullPtr *    val )

Assignment operator. This overloaded variant is provided for the sole purpose of setting a DOM_Node reference variable to zero. Nulling out a reference variable in this way will decrement the reference count on the underlying Node object that the variable formerly referenced. This effect is normally obtained when reference variable goes out of scope, but zeroing them can be useful for global instances, or for local instances that will remain in scope for an extended time, when the storage belonging to the underlying node needs to be reclaimed. Parameters: val  Only a value of 0, or null, is allowed. Reimplemented from DOM_Node.

DOM_DocumentFragment & DOM_DocumentFragment::operator= (  const DOM_DocumentFragment &    other )

Assignment operator Parameters: other  The object to be copied

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The documentation for this class was generated from the following files:

• DOM_DocumentFragment.hpp
• DOM_DocumentFragment.cpp

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