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Templates and the template element
Working with DOM13/23
Back to the list of tasks
  • 1. What are you planning to do?
  • 2. The “change” event
  • 3. How the “change” event works
  • 4. Deleting the element from the list
  • 5. How to check the collection length
  • 6. Debugging the code
  • 7. Static and live collections
  • 8. Displaying the message on the page
  • 9. The “submit” event
  • 10. Cancelling the form submission
  • 11. How to obtain text from the input field
  • 12. Templates and the template element
  • 13. Template contents and DocumentFragment
  • 14. Cloning and inserting elements, part 1
  • 15. Cloning and inserting elements, part 2
  • 16. Cloning and inserting elements, part 3
  • 17. Cloning and inserting elements, part 4
  • 18. How to clone elements
  • 19. Adding a new element to a list
  • 20. Deleting a new task in the list
  • 21. Clearing the input field
  • 22. Summary of “Working with DOM”
  • 23. The third program: “Instant messenger”
Cloning and inserting elements, part 1
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Template contents and DocumentFragment

If you expand taskTemplate in the console, you will see that it contains a DocumentFragment in its content property, with the task element that we need inside it.

What exactly is this DocumentFragment, and how can we find the task element inside it?

The template element stores its contents in a DocumentFragment, a container for DOM nodes. These contents are inert and are not displayed as part of the page. You can see this for yourself if you add styles to the tag itself: for example, display: block, an explicitly set width and height, and a bright background color. In that case, you will see the template element on the page, but you won’t see its contents.

Calling querySelector on the template element does not search its contents. To search those nodes, first read the template’s content property. It gives us a DocumentFragment, on which we can use querySelector and other search methods.

<body>
  …
  <template id="text-template">
    <p class="text"></p>
  </template>
</body>

If we want to find an element in the template, we need to perform the following search:

var template = document.querySelector('#text-template');
// A template was found in the document.

var content = template.content;
// We obtained the contents, a DocumentFragment.

var text = content.querySelector('.text');
// We found the paragraph element inside the fragment.

We can shorten this code. For example, we can assign the content directly to one variable and the element found inside it to another variable.

var textTemplate = document.querySelector('#text-template').content;
var text = textTemplate.querySelector('.text');

This type of code is more convenient, because the template element is not typically used by itself in the code. All of the work is done with its content and the element that is stored in this content.

You can change the text and classes in the template, and then you can add elements to the page. This is what we will do in the following steps. In the meantime, find the content and then the element with the todo-list-item class inside it. This is the new task template.

Comments

  • index.html
  • style.css
  • script.js
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>The To-Do List</title> <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet"> </head> <body> <h1 class="visually-hidden">The To-Do List</h1> <ul class="todo-list"> </ul> <p class="empty-tasks">All of the tasks have been completed. There are no new tasks.</p> <form class="add-form" action="https://echo.htmlacademy.ru/courses" method="post"> <input class="add-form-input" type="text" aria-label="Task description" placeholder="For example, buy an elephant" required> <button class="add-form-button" type="submit">Add new task</button> </form> <template id="task-template"> <li class="todo-list-item"> <label> <input type="checkbox" class="todo-list-input"> <span></span> </label> </li> </template> <script src="script.js"></script> </body> </html>
CSS
@font-face { font-weight: 400; font-family: "Muller"; font-style: normal; font-display: swap; src: url("fonts/Muller.woff") format("woff"); } body { margin: 40px 32px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: "Muller", sans-serif; } .visually-hidden, .todo-list-input { position: absolute; width: 1px; height: 1px; margin: -1px; padding: 0; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; border: 0; clip: rect(0 0 0 0); clip-path: inset(100%); } .hidden { display: none; } .todo-list { margin: 0; padding: 0; list-style: none; } .todo-list-item { margin-bottom: 12px; } .todo-list-item label { display: block; padding: 12px 18px; background-color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: 0 2px 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); cursor: pointer; user-select: none; } .todo-list-item span { display: flex; align-items: center; } .todo-list-input + span::before { content: ""; display: inline-block; width: 16px; height: 16px; margin-right: 16px; background-color: #ffffff; border: 2px solid #69b253; border-radius: 4px; } .todo-list-input:checked + span::before { background-color: #69b253; background-image: url("check-white.svg"); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center; } .todo-list-input:not(:checked):hover + span::before, .todo-list-input:not(:checked):focus + span::before { background-color: rgba(105, 178, 83, 0.2); } .empty-tasks { color: #69b253; } .empty-tasks::before { content: ""; width: 14px; height: 13px; margin-right: 13px; background-image: url("check-green.svg"); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center; } .add-form { display: flex; } .add-form-input { flex-grow: 1; box-sizing: border-box; height: 46px; margin-right: 16px; padding: 12px; font: inherit; border: 1px solid #a1b5c4; border-radius: 4px; } .add-form-input:focus { border: 1px solid #69b253; outline: none; } .add-form-input:hover { box-shadow: 0 0 6px rgba(105, 178, 83, 0.6); } .add-form-input::placeholder { color: #a1b5c4; } .add-form-button { flex-shrink: 0; padding: 12px; font: inherit; color: #ffffff; background-color: #69b253; border: none; border-radius: 4px; user-select: none; touch-action: manipulation; } .add-form-button:hover, .add-form-button:focus { background-color: #5aa045; outline: none; } .add-form-button:active { background-color: #42862e; }
JavaScript
var list = document.querySelector('.todo-list'); var items = list.children; var emptyListMessage = document.querySelector('.empty-tasks'); var newItemForm = document.querySelector('.add-form'); var newItemTitle = newItemForm.querySelector('.add-form-input'); var taskTemplate = document.querySelector('#task-template'); console.log(taskTemplate); var toggleEmptyListMessage = function () { if (items.length === 0) { emptyListMessage.classList.remove('hidden'); } }; var addCheckHandler = function (item) { var checkbox = item.querySelector('.todo-list-input'); checkbox.addEventListener('change', function () { item.remove(); toggleEmptyListMessage(); }); }; for (var i = 0; i < items.length; i++) { addCheckHandler(items[i]); } newItemForm.addEventListener('submit', function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var taskText = newItemTitle.value; });

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Console
Goalscompleted
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    1. In the initializer for the taskTemplate variable, change document.querySelector('#task-template') to document.querySelector('#task-template').content.
    2. After the console.log statement that outputs taskTemplate, declare a variable newItemTemplate, which contains an element with the todo-list-item class. Look inside taskTemplate.
    3. On the next line, output newItemTemplate to the console.

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