Storing the highlighted text locations of UIWebView in a Database

Question

I am working on an eReader project where users can highlight the text of their interest. I have been able to highlight the text by this code:

- (void)markHighlightedString:(id)sender {

// The JS File
NSString *filePath  = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"HighlightedString" ofType:@"js" inDirectory:@""];
NSData *fileData    = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:filePath];
NSString *jsString  = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithData:fileData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
[self.bookTextWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:jsString];

// The JS Function
NSString *startSearch   = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"stylizeHighlightedString()"];
[self.bookTextWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:startSearch];}

stylizeHighlightedString() is:

function stylizeHighlightedString() {

var range               = window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0);
var selectionContents   = range.extractContents();
var span                = document.createElement("span");

span.appendChild(selectionContents);

span.setAttribute("class","uiWebviewHighlight");
span.style.color            = "red";

range.insertNode(span);}

Now, I want to persist this highlighted text information in the database so that the previously highlighted text can be shown the next time the application is run.

Is this doable?

Answer 1

You could brake the script you are using into two scripts for this. The first one would query for the selected range and return it . You could than parse the returned range and create an (Obj-)C object for it and store it. The second script would do the actual highlighting of the provided range / ranges. For that to happen you need to dynamically compose the javascript by pre-prending the ranges as javascript variables to the javascript string.