Pulling a style from a TinyMCE selection - tinymce-4

Question

I'm trying to implement a TinyMCE button that will apply the style of the selection to the entire box. I'm having trouble, though, reading the style of the selection when the selection is buried in a span in a span in a paragraph. Let's consider 'color' for example. Below I have a box with some text and I've selected "here" in the paragraph and made it red.
The HTML for the paragraph is now:
The code behind my button to apply the style of the selection to the box is
var selected_color = $(ed.selection.getNode()).css('color');
console.log("color pulled is ", selected_color);
$(ed.bodyElement).css('color', selected_color);
It doesn't work because the color pulled is black, not red, so the third line just re-applies the black that's already there. (If I replace selected_color in the third line with 'blue' everything goes blue.) So the problem is pulling the color of the current selection.
Does anyone know how I can do this reliably, no matter how buried the selection is?
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I also noticed somewhat a strange behavior up and there, with selections of nested span's and div's, but honestly i'm not able to recognize if this is a bug of TinyMCE, a browser issue or a combination of both (most probably).
So, waiting for some more information from you (maybe also your plugin code) in the meanwhile i realized two proposal to achieve what you want: the first plugin behaves like the format painter in word, the second is simply applying the current detected foreground color to the whole paragraph.
As you move throug the editor with the keyboard or mouse, you will see the current detected foreground color highlighted and applied as background to the second plugin button.
Key point here are two functions to get the styles back from the cursor position:
function findStyle(el, attr) {
var styles, style, color;
try {
styles = $(el).attr('style');
if(typeof styles !== typeof undefined && styles !== false) {
styles.split(";").forEach(function(e) {
style = e.split(":");
if($.trim(style[0]) === attr) {
color = $(el).css(attr);
}
});
}
} catch (err) {}
return color;
}
function findForeColor(node) {
var $el = $(node), color;
while ($el.prop("tagName").toUpperCase() != "BODY") {
color = findStyle($el, "color");
if (color) break;
$el = $el.parent();
}
return color;
}
The try...catch block is needed to avoid some occasional errors when a selected text is restyled. If you look at the TinyMCE sorce code you will notice a plenty of timing events, this is a unavoidable and common practice when dealing with styles and css, even more with user interaction. There was a great job done by the authors of TinyMCE to make the editor cross-browser.
You can try out the first plugin in the Fiddle below. The second plugin is simpler as the first one. lastForeColor is determined in ed.on('NodeChange'), so the code in button click is very easy.
tinymce.PluginManager.add('example2', function(ed, url) {
// Add a button that opens a window
ed.addButton('example2', {
text: '',
icon: "apply-forecolor",
onclick: function() {
if(lastForeColor) {
var applyColor = lastForeColor;
ed.execCommand('SelectAll');
ed.fire('SelectionChange');
ed.execCommand('forecolor', false, applyColor);
ed.selection.collapse(false);
ed.fire('SelectionChange');
}
return false;
}
});
});
Moreover: i think there is a potential issue with your piece of code here:
$(ed.bodyElement).css('color', selected_color);
i guess the style should be applied in a different way, so in my example i'm using standard TinyMCE commands to apply the foreground color to all, as i wasn't able to exactly convert your screenshot to code. Please share your thoughts in a comment.
Fiddle with both plugins: https://jsfiddle.net/ufp0Lvow/

Answer 2

deblocker,
Amazing work! Thank you!
Your jsfiddle did the trick. I replaced the HTML with what was in my example and changed the selector in tinymce.init from a textarea to a div and it pulls the color out perfectly from my example. The modified jsfiddle is at https://jsfiddle.net/79r3vkyq/3/ . I'll be studying and learning from your code for a long time.
Regarding your question about
$(ed.bodyElement).css('color', selected_color);
the divs I attach tinymce to all have ids and the one the editor is currently attached to is reported in ed.bodyElement. I haven't had any trouble using this but I have no problem using your
ed.execCommand('SelectAll');
ed.fire('SelectionChange');
ed.execCommand('forecolor', false, applyColor);
Thanks again! Great job!