Marking selection to restore

[Reinmar]

In general, the algorithm which chooses the selection to restore works now really well. I don't remember issues in normal use cases yet.

Unfortunately, in the autoformatting feature the thing is more complex. After typing the "*" character closing the:

<p>xxx **bold me**^</p>

fragment we want to move selection to:

<p>xxx [bold me]</p>

bold this text, move the selection after that fragment and remove the bold attribute from the selection (it will be enabled automatically but we want to quit bold formatting at this point).

The code looks like this:

https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-autoformat/blob/t/3-selection-issue/src/inlineautoformatengine.js#L146-L155

Now, after autoformatting bolded the word, you may want to undo the default action. What you would like to get after pressing ctrl+z is again <p>xxx **bold me**^</p>, but what you get now is: <p>xxx **[bold me]**</p>.

So what we miss here is the ability to tell the engine/undo feature to use a selection from a particular moment in the process. It's not any more the selection from before the last operation, but more older one.

Do we have any ideas how this could be achieved? I believe that more control over the selection will be needed any way. We have full control over the content cause its changes are grouped in batches, but the selection is independent of all that. It will cause a problems, I'm afraid.

[scofalik]

I don't like how selection and undo work together right now so I am open to discuss this. Unfortunately, this will probably need a bigger refactoring.

[Reinmar]

I marked this as a 1.0.0 candidate. It doesn't make sense to deep dive into this now, but it should be considered at some point.

[scofalik]

There was an idea to hook callbacks somehow to undo steps. The idea is nice but it would be against the other idea that undo integration should be "behind the scenes". When writing a feature you should never thing about undo - that would be perfect.

Since undo operates on "batches" (batches are stores and then reversed) maybe we could somehow add such a callback to the batch? It would be then fired during undoing that batch. Maybe this has some sense.

[Reinmar]

It's possible that it can stay "behind the scenes" in the majority of cases. If we'd just enable custom matching selection to batch (or how are they related), then features which need this would be satisfied. In all other cases you wouldn't need using this method and would base on the current default behaviour.

[scofalik]

I am already thinking of other issues, like restoring markers.

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[CKEditorBot]

There has been no activity on this issue for the past year. We've marked it as stale and will close it in 30 days. We understand it may still be relevant, so if you're interested in the solution, leave a comment or reaction under this issue.

[CKEditorBot]

We've closed your issue due to inactivity over the last year. We understand that the issue may still be relevant. If so, feel free to open a new one (and link this issue to it).