Element.insert/update should accept DOM nodes
Reported by Andrew Plotkin | June 11th, 2008 @ 09:26 PM | in Inline documentation
I'm not sure that's the right solution to my problem, but it's the solution which is most consistent with the Prototype docs at present.
I'm writing a function which takes some text and puts it into an Element. I'd think this would be a very common operation, but Prototype balks. I try many things:
el.textContent = str;
...works in webkit/firefox, but not konqueror 3 or IE6.
el.update(str);
...parses str as HTML, which is not what I want at all. (If str contains "<" signs, the page comes out broken and possibly a security hole.) </p> <pre><code class="javascript"> el.update(str.escapeHTML()); </code></pre> <p> ...works, but then every piece of text that flows through my app is being escaped and then unescaped, which seems painfully inefficient. </p> <pre><code class="javascript"> el.update(document.createTextNode(str)); </code></pre> <p> ...inserts "[object Text]" rather than my string. </p> <pre><code class="javascript"> el.update().appendChild(document.createTextNode(str)); </code></pre> <p> ...works, by virtue of avoiding the Prototype API as much as possible. :) </p><p> I'd like a clean and supported way to do this inside Prototype. Accepting DOM text nodes in update() seems like the tidiest option. </p><p> This goes for Element.insert() as well. The docs say it accepts a "DOM element", but the code </p> <pre><code class="javascript"> el.insert(document.createTextNode(str)); </code></pre> <p> ...causes an "undefined" error inside Prototype.
Comments and changes to this ticket
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Andrew Plotkin June 11th, 2008 @ 09:28 PM
Ack! I appear to have destroyed the formatting of the bug. Sorry! I can refile it without the offending LESS-THAN-SIGN if you want.
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Juriy Zaytsev June 11th, 2008 @ 10:03 PM
Interesting.
So why can't you just crete an element helper:
Element.addMethods({ updateText: function(element, text) { element = $(element); element.update().appendChild(document.createTextNode(text)); return element; } }) ... $('someElement').updateText('someText'); -
Andrew Plotkin June 11th, 2008 @ 11:07 PM
That is just what I will do, tonight, for this version of my project using Prototype 1.6.0.2.
But this seems like a feature within Prototype's sphere of competence. I spent a lot of time going through various options, figuring out why each one didn't work (until I came up with the last one). Plus, as I said, the docs for Element.insert() are at best misleading.
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Juriy Zaytsev June 11th, 2008 @ 11:45 PM
- → Assigned user changed from “” to “Andrew Dupont”
- → Milestone changed from “” to “Inline documentation”
- → State changed from “new” to “doc”
Thanks, Andrew.
I'll mark it as a documentation issue.
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The Prototype JavaScript library.
Andrew Dupont