Table of Contents

theNode.cloneNode(deep)

Arguments

deep

A Boolean indicating whether to recursively include theNode's children in the clone operation. If true, clone the entire hierarchy starting at theNode. If false, clone only theNode itself (and its attributes, if it is an element node).

Returns

A duplicate of the theNode object, optionally including its subtree.

Description

The cloneNode( ) method creates and returns a copy of theNode, where theNode can be an XML or XMLnode instance. If theNode is an element node, the clone includes all of theNode's attributes and values. If deep is true, the returned copy includes the entire node hierarchy descending from theNode.

We often use cloneNode( ) to create a new, independent node based on an existing template (which saves us from generating the new node structure manually). Normally, once we've cloned a node, we customize it and insert it into an existing XML document using either appendChild( ) or insertBefore( ). The following example clones the first paragraph of a document to make a sibling paragraph with the same structure:

// Create a new document
myDoc = new XML('<P>paragraph 1</P>');
   
// Make a clone of the first paragraph
newP = myDoc.firstChild.cloneNode(true);
   
// Customize the clone
newP.firstChild.nodeValue = "paragraph 2";
   
// Add the clone into the document
myDoc.appendChild(newP);
   
trace(myDoc);  // Displays: "<P>paragraph 1</P><P>paragraph 2</P>"

Note that the text in an element is stored in a separate child node of that element, so we must set deep to true to preserve an element's text content in a clone operation. Remember that cloneNode( ) does not insert the element it returns into the node's hierarchy�we must do that ourselves using appendChild( ) or insertBefore( ).

See Also

XML.appendChild( ), XML.createElement( ), XML.createTextNode( ), XML.insertBefore( )

Table of Contents