|
||||||||||
PREV CLASS NEXT CLASS | FRAMES NO FRAMES | |||||||||
SUMMARY: INNER | FIELD | CONSTR | METHOD | DETAIL: FIELD | CONSTR | METHOD |
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()
.
Fields inherited from interface org.w3c.dom.Node |
ATTRIBUTE_NODE,
CDATA_SECTION_NODE,
COMMENT_NODE,
DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE,
DOCUMENT_NODE,
DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE,
ELEMENT_NODE,
ENTITY_NODE,
ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE,
NOTATION_NODE,
PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE,
TEXT_NODE |
Methods inherited from interface org.w3c.dom.Node |
appendChild,
cloneNode,
getAttributes,
getChildNodes,
getFirstChild,
getLastChild,
getNextSibling,
getNodeName,
getNodeType,
getNodeValue,
getOwnerDocument,
getParentNode,
getPreviousSibling,
hasChildNodes,
insertBefore,
removeChild,
replaceChild,
setNodeValue |
|
||||||||||
PREV CLASS NEXT CLASS | FRAMES NO FRAMES | |||||||||
SUMMARY: INNER | FIELD | CONSTR | METHOD | DETAIL: FIELD | CONSTR | METHOD |