Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

DocumentFragment

Synopsis

The DocumentFragment interface represents a portion—or fragment—of a document. More specifically, it represents one or more adjacent document nodes, and all of the descendants of each. DocumentFragment nodes are never part of a document tree, and getParentNode( ) always returns null. Although a DocumentFragment does not have a parent, it can have children, and you can use the inherited Node methods to add child nodes (or delete or replace them) to a DocumentFragment.

DocumentFragment nodes exhibit a special behavior that makes them quite useful: when a request is made to insert a DocumentFragment into a document tree, it is not the DocumentFragment node itself that is inserted, but each of the children of the DocumentFragment instead. This makes DocumentFragment useful as a temporary placeholder for a sequence of nodes that you wish to insert, all at once, into a document.

You can create a new, empty, DocumentFragment to work with by calling the createDocumentFragment( ) method of the desired Document.

Figure 21-6. org.w3c.dom.DocumentFragment

public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {
}

Returned By

Document.createDocumentFragment( )