Find an element by CSS selector in GWT

I'm trying to grab an arbitrary element using a CSS selector (eg. "#someId .className a") in GWT.

I'm building a JS widget that can live on a 3rd party website and want to be able to interact with elements on the page. Searching through the JavaDocs I don't see anything that can find an element by selector. I did come across开发者_运维百科 GQuery, but it seems like the project might be dead and I'm not sure if it works with GWT 2.

One option I've considered is wrapping an existing library (jQuery, Mootools, Prototype, etc) into a GWT class and exposing the desired behavior through JSNI. It seems this might be very builky.

Anyone have experience using generic CSS selectors in GWT?

There's the DOM class, that provides many wrapper methods for accessing the DOM tree. There's no function that takes a CSS selector jQuery style that I'm aware of - GWT just encourages/enforces accessing DOM elements through Widgets (and such), not directly - though I understand that in your case such "low-level" approach might be needed. The only way I see pulling that off through pure Java GWT methods is via lots and lots of (probably horrible) chaining/invocations of the DOM class. It'd be easier if all you had to do was access some id - for that there's RootPanel.get(id) (and DOM.getElementById(id), they differ in what type of objects they return).

However, like you already suggested, JSNI might offer a better solution - try returning, for example, $wnd.$("#someId .className a") from JSNI as an Element - actually, you can return anything as anything from JSNI, GWT will just crap up the second you try to use, say an int as a DOM element or something.

PS: while the GQuery project does seem dead/inactive, it might be worth checking how they wrapped the jQuery calls (such as $) so that they could be used seemingly in GWT.

Use GwtQuery, is updated to GWT 2.4: http://code.google.com/p/gwtquery/

Selector examples :

//select an element having id equals to 'container'
GQuery myElement = $("#container");
//select all elements having 'article' as css class
GQuery allArticles = $(".article");
/select all cells of tables
GQuery allCells = $("table > tr > td");
//find the ul elements being inside a element with class 'article' itself inside a element with id 'container'
GQuery articleUls = $("#container .article ul");

http://code.google.com/p/gwtquery/wiki/GettingStarted

You could use querySelector() and querySelectorAll(), available for newer browsers...

http://www.javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/css_selectors_api.shtml

...in terms of browser support, querySelector() and querySelectorAll() is supported in Firefox 3.1+, IE8+ (only in IE8 standards mode), and Safari 3.1+

Inspire by Asfand Yar Qazi answer.

With JSNI you can just define this method and enjoy it when you web app is running in modern browsers.

public final native NodeList<Element> querySelectorAll(String selectors) /*-{
 return $doc.querySelectorAll(selectors);
 }-*/;

Here's an example using the GWT Element and Node classes to find a single nested element with a given class name. This is not as open ended and powerful as a literal CSS selector, but can be modified as needed for your specific use case:

static public Element findFirstChildElementByClassName( Widget w, String className ){
    return findFirstChildElementByClassName( w.getElement(), className );
}
static private Element findFirstChildElementByClassName( Element e, String className ){     
    for( int i=0; i != e.getChildCount(); ++i ){
        Node childNode = e.getChild(i);
        if( childNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE ){
            Element childElement = (Element)childNode;
            if( childElement.getClassName().equalsIgnoreCase( className ) )
                return childElement;
            else if( childElement.hasChildNodes() ){
                Element grandChildElement = 
                    findFirstChildElementByClassName( 
                            childElement, className );
                if( grandChildElement != null ) return grandChildElement;
            }
        }
    }
    return null;
}