How to get css property of a DOM element server-side?

Question

I can only think of a client-side solution using jQuery, but is it possible to resolve the css porperties of a page's element from the server side?

I was thinking of using a CSS parser to fish out the properties, but that wouldn't work due to the cascade nature of CSS.

Thanks!

Answer 1

From within C# you have all DOM wrapped in Classes and Collection.

button.Styles.Add("style", "value");
button.Styles["style"] = "value";

Cascade and inheritance will not be reflected on server side.

Answer 2

Not sure if this helps, but there is a Java project called jTidy that will take in html (malformed or not) and represent it with a DOM interface. From their site,

"In addition, JTidy provides a DOM interface to the document that is being processed, which effectively makes you able to use JTidy as a DOM parser for real-world HTML." - http://jtidy.sourceforge.net/

I've used it on a personal projects before that were written in Coldfusion to make it easier to extract links from crawled pages. Instead of big nasty regular expressions, I was able to use xPath to 'query' against the dom for my elements. In some ways, xPath is similiar to jQuery's selectors.

Answer 3

Do you need to do something with the value before the page loads? If not you can just do it in jQuery and then Ajax post the value back to CF.

Answer 4

your answer is extremely general and it's very hard to understand what exactly you want to do. could you possibly provide a code example.

if all you want to do is add a class to an element based off of some server side logic, then just do:

<a href="" style="<cfif a eq a>myclass</cfif>"></a>

EDIT:

Henry would like to determine that the color of an element (eg: #title) and then run some coldfusion based on what the color is:

The best way I could figure on doing this would be on the client end you would use jQuery to determine the color and call an ajax request based on it:

$(function(){

    var color = $("#title").css("color");

    if(color == "blue")
    {
     $("#my-code-container").load("my-logic.cfm");
    }

});

Answer 5

Use the client ("a client") to help you.

Render the page to the client, write jQuery that runs in the Browser and posts back the CSS properties to one of your CF pages.

What are you trying to do with that info?

Answer 6

I'm reasonably sure that there is no server-side solution for this - the JRun server doesn't actually know what it's sending to the web server; it just processes the code and pushes off the result.

Answer 7

From the longshot department:

If you are using a version of CF that uses JDK 6, you could technically jump into RHINO and execute JQuery through that and have it parse the files, allowing you to get the styles.

RHINO doesn't really contain the DOM and, I believe, JQuery requires it, so this is a real longshot.

Answer 8

Java 7 with built-in webkit engine! :)