Question

I want to select a cell range in an HTML table and using Javascript to change the background color of the selected cells. Is there an event to get all ids of the selected cells?

---

I tried this code:

function getSelectedCells()
{
   selObj = window.getSelection();
   alert(selObj);
}

And it printed out the cell content of the selected cells. Does anyone know how i can use this to get the id of the selected cells?

Answer 1

I will try your approach. I found a solution myself but it is far from pretty and only because I know how the ids of the cells are structured. Here is the code but it only works sometimes. I guess the regular expression is a little buggy. I use this to avoid changing the background from the wrong cells:

function foo() 
{  
    selecIds = new Array();

    sel = window.getSelection();

    firstPosSelA = sel.anchorNode;
    lastPosSelF = sel.focusNode;

    firstCellId = firstPosSelA.parentNode.getAttribute("id");
    lastCellId = lastPosSelF.parentNode.getAttribute("id");

    startSelNumInd = firstCellId.indexOf("wc");
    endSelNumInd = lastCellId.indexOf("wc");

    startSelNum = firstCellId.substring(startSelNumInd + 2);
    endSelNum = lastCellId.substring(endSelNumInd + 2);
    firstSelecRow = firstCellId.substring(0, startSelNumInd + 2);

    for ( i = startSelNum; i <= endSelNum; i++)
    {
        cellid = firstSelecRow + i;
        selecIds.push(cellid); 
    }

    alert(selecIds);

    for ( eachSelCell in selecIds)
    {
        currentElement = document.getElementById(selecIds[eachSelCell]);
        backColor = currentElement.style.backgroundColor;

        if (backColor !='' || backColor!='#C0C0C0' || backColor!='#c0c0c0' || backColor!='rgb(192, 192, 192)' || backColor!='RGB(192, 192, 192)')
        {
            if (/\d\w/.test(selecIds[eachSelCell]) || (/fc/.test(selecIds[eachSelCell])))
            {
            }   
            else
            {
                changeBackgroundColor(selecIds[eachSelCell]);
            }   
        }
    }
}