DocumentFragment

# GdomeSmartDOM::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 insertBefore and appendChild.

Inherits from
Node

Default Constructor
DocumentFragment(GdomeDocumentFragment* = 0)
Creates a smart pointer for the Gdome element whose pointer is passed as an argument. The user should never pass a non-null pointer to this constructor.

Copy and Cast Constructors
DocumentFragment(const DocumentFragment&) DocumentFragment(const Node&)
These constructors can be used to copy a smart pointer or to downcast it. If the downcasting is not possible, the resulting smart pointer will be null.

Copy Operator
DocumentFragment& operator=(const DocumentFragment&)

Equality
bool operator==(const DocumentFragment&) const bool operator!=(const DocumentFragment&) const
Two smart pointers are equal if they point to the same Gdome object.

This file has been generated automatically on mar apr 9 10:53:25 CEST 2002 as part of GMetaDOM. For more information see the home page of the project, or contact the main author: luca.padovani@cs.unibo.it.