The implementation of undo/redo in the HtmlArea has some limitations you should be aware of. It is possible to undo all of your steps but redo is only possible when no other action occured between the undo and the redo action. If you undo several steps and e.g. enter some text you can not execute redo anymore.
Note
If you use the Undo/Redo functionality you have to make sure you are not manipulating the content of the HtmlArea by using the innerHTML property of an element.
This will break Undo/Redo functionality!
The implementation is split up into two different approaches.
For Internet Explorer the execCommand approach can't be used anymore. The internal undo / redo stack gets broken on every DOM manipulation. So, if any qooxdoo decorator is used this approach is a dead end. Instead an own implementation using innerHTML is used for IE browsers.
For all other browsers the base of the Undo/Redo functionality is to use the execCommand method to manipulate the content whenever possible. Each change which is performed with a call of execCommand is easy to undo/redo. For any manipulation which cannot be achieved using the built-in execCommand a special implementation for each browser is necessary (e.g. changing the background color of the whole document).
To easily integrate the undo/redo management with the commands of the HtmlArea the UndoManager class is a decorator of the CommandManager class. It takes the method calls from the HtmlArea class, collects the info for undo the action and calls the decorated commandManager class to actually perform the requested action. This keeps both implementations clean and separated.
Two stacks keep track of the changes which are done to the content: an undo stack and the corresponding redo stack. Currently each stack holds four different types of changes:
Each entry in the stacks is represented by an object which holds additional info (the type above is among this info).
Every change which is performed with the execCommand method is equipped with this type. These changes are the easiest to track and to undo/redo.
Each keypress event is observed to determine changes in the content and to mark a set of content changes as an own block which is capable for an undo/redo step. For example IE and Gecko do both recognize text changes as a content block if the text changes occured between two calls of execCommand.
These changes are the ones which cannot be handled with the built-in execCommand method. For example changing the background color of the whole document is a custom undo/redo step which needs to be handled in a special way by each browser.
These steps are included to keep the stacks intact if the user e.g. resizes an images with the handles provided by the browsers. It is possible to undo/redo these internal changes with the common execCommand method. The primary task here is to record these changes and add them to the stack(s).