javascript - How to create tooltip over text selection without wrapping?

Question

My end goal is to create a tooltip over a text selection. The user will then be able to interact with the tooltip similar to . Please note that I was able to accomplish this by wrapping selected text in a tag and then creating the tooltip on it however this is no longer an option for me due to some other requirements and functionality issues. If you notice in the image above in element inspector, the selected text is not wrapped in any kind of tag, the tooltip is just created over the selection. I have already looked at this and it will not work for me because mouse position may not be the same as the end of selection. I need the actual selection position.

General question: What is the best way to accomplish this? More specific questions:

• Should I be using the coordinates of the selection? If so is there a way to get the coordinates of the top corners of the rectangular selection so I can find the mid point and create a the tooltip over that.
• Is there a way to get that selection as an element? So I can just place a tooltip over that? (Note the selection can be multiple nodes)

Answer 1

Assuming something selected

var selection = window.getSelection(),      // get the selection then
    range = selection.getRangeAt(0),        // the range at first selection group
    rect = range.getBoundingClientRect(); // and convert this to useful data

rect is now a Object which holds the positions relative the the current scroll coordinates of the Window. More info on this here. If you want to be even more precise, you can use getClientRects which returns a list of such Objects, which you would then have to put together to form the area of the selection.

Now, to draw a box around it (I'll take the easy route using fixed for demonstration purposes)

var div = document.createElement('div');   // make box
div.style.border = '2px solid black';      // with outline
div.style.position = 'fixed';              // fixed positioning = easy mode
div.style.top = rect.top + 'px';       // set coordinates
div.style.left = rect.left + 'px';
div.style.height = rect.height + 'px'; // and size
div.style.width = rect.width + 'px';
document.body.appendChild(div);            // finally append

You will probably want to take into consideration the scroll position so you can use absolute positioning. If there are no other scrollable elements, this means you just need to factor in the values of window.scrollX and window.scrollY, which are the position of the window's x and y coordinates in pixels at the time they're accessed.

var div = null;

function drawBorderAroundSelection() {
  var selection = window.getSelection(), // get the selection then
    range = selection.getRangeAt(0), // the range at first selection group
    rect = range.getBoundingClientRect(); // and convert this to useful data

  if (rect.width > 0) {
    if (div) {
      div.parentNode.removeChild(div);
    }
    div = document.createElement('div'); // make box
    div.class = 'rect';
    div.style.border = '2px solid black'; // with outline
    div.style.position = 'fixed'; // fixed positioning = easy mode
    div.style.top = rect.top + 'px'; // set coordinates
    div.style.left = rect.left + 'px';
    div.style.height = rect.height + 'px'; // and size
    div.style.width = rect.width + 'px';
    document.body.appendChild(div); // finally append
  }
}

window.onmouseup = drawBorderAroundSelection;

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