Find an element by CSS selector in GWT

Question

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 a

Answer 1

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.