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# DOM::DocumentFragment Class Reference

`DocumentFragment` is a "lightweight" or "minimal" `Document` object. More...

`#include <dom_doc.h>`

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List of all members.

## Public Member Functions
| DocumentFragment (const DocumentFragment &other)
| DocumentFragment (const Node &other)
DocumentFragment & | operator= (const Node &other)
DocumentFragment & | operator= (const DocumentFragment &other)
## Protected Member Functions
| DocumentFragment (DocumentFragmentImpl *i)
## Friends
class | Document
class | HTMLElementImpl
class | Range

## Detailed Description

`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()` .

Definition at line 991 of file dom_doc.h.

The documentation for this class was generated from the following files:

- dom_doc.h
- dom_doc.cpp

This file is part of the documentation for khtml Library Version 3.4.1.
Documentation copyright © 1996-2004 the KDE developers.
Generated on Sat Jun 11 20:33:43 2005 by doxygen 1.4.1 written by Dimitri van Heesch, © 1997-2003