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Selection Save Restore Module
This module saves and restores a user selection using invisible marker elements in the DOM. This is useful in situations where the selection may be lost for some reason, such as when altering large portions of the DOM or using innerHTML to alter and replace the contents of an element. So long as the marker elements (or new elements with their ids) are still present, the selection can be restored.
There is a limitation to this method, which is that due to it being impossible to programmatically create a backwards selection in IE, the backwardsness of a selection is is always lost when it is restored using rangy.restoreSelection().
You can see a live example of this module in action here.
Imagine the following HTML containing a selection (denoted below by | characters):
<p>
A cup of |tea and a <b>slice| of cake</b>, please.
</p>
You can save the selection using this Rangy module as follows:
var savedSel = rangy.saveSelection();
This action adds hidden marker elements into the DOM. An HTML representation of the DOM would now look something like
<p>
A cup of <span id="x"></span>tea and a <b>slice<span id="y"></span> of cake</b>, please.
</p>
The id of these marker elements (x and y above) are actually randomly generated to be unique.
Now, imagine something happens to this content that will destroy the selection and potentially change the DOM. Provided the marker elements have survived, you can later restore the old selection:
rangy.restoreSelection(savedSel);
This will also remove the marker elements.
If you've saved a selection but do not need to restore it, you can remove the marker elements:
rangy.removeMarkers(savedSel);
Square brackets around one or more function or method parameters indicate that the parameter(s) is/are optional.
Saves the current selection for the specified window by adding hidden marker elements into the DOM at the beginning and end of the selection (or a single marker element if the selection is an insertion point or caret). If no window is specified, the current window is used.
Returns an object representing the saved selection that may later be passed to rangy.restoreSelection().
Note
From version 1.1.2, if this method is called in Internet Explorer for an iframe that has lost the focus and previously had a collapsed selection (caret), the method will abort and return null. Previously, this method would insert a marker in the main document rather than the iframe in such circumstances, which is clearly undesirable. To avoid this happening, call the focus() method on the iframe's window before calling rangy.saveSelection(). This is due to a quirk in Internet Explorer and doesn't affect any other browser. See issue 46 for a discussion.
Restores the selection from an object previously returned by rangy.saveSelection(). It removes any hidden marker elements created by that method.
If preserveDirection is supplied and is true, the direction of the selection is preserved. However, this will only work in browsers with a native Selection object that supports the extend() method, meaning this parameter will have no effect in IE.
When the selection being restored contains only a single range, this method calls normalizeBoundaries() on the range being restored. If the selection contains multiple ranges, no boundary normalization is performed.
Saves the current range by adding hidden marker elements into the DOM at the beginning and end of the selection (or a single marker element if the selection is an insertion point or caret).
Returns an object representing the saved range that may later be passed to rangy.restoreRange().
Restores a range from an object previously returned by rangy.saveRange(). It removes any hidden marker elements created by that method.
normalize is optional and controls whether normalizeBoundaries() is called on the restored range. The default is true.
Saves the current range by adding hidden marker elements into the DOM at the beginning and end of the selection (or a single marker element if the selection is an insertion point or caret).
direction indicates a direction to be stored with each saved range and may be any of the strings "forward", "forwards", "backward" or "backwards" or a Boolean (in which case true corresponds to "backwards").
Returns an array of object representing the saved ranges that may later be passed to rangy.restoreRanges().
Restores an array of ranges from an object previously returned by rangy.saveRanges(). It removes any hidden marker elements created by that method.
Removes the hidden marker elements associated with a saved selection object previously returned by rangy.saveSelection(). This saved selection can then no longer be restored.