Hey everyone! I’m working on a project where I need to identify if there’s a named range at the current cursor position in a Google Docs document using Google Apps Script.
My situation: I’m creating a document review system where I mark specific sections with named ranges to indicate they need review. When someone places their cursor in the document, I want to check if that position falls within any existing named range so I can display a notification that this section has review comments.
What I need: A way to programmatically detect which named range (if any) contains the current cursor position in the document.
Has anyone worked with this before? I’ve been searching through the Apps Script documentation but haven’t found a clear method to accomplish this. Any guidance or code examples would be really helpful!
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Had to solve this exact problem for a document annotation tool I built last year. You need to handle edge cases where the cursor’s at element boundaries or in empty paragraphs. After getting the cursor position, normalize the position data before comparing against named ranges - this part’s crucial. The tricky bit is nested elements. Tables, images, and other non-text stuff will mess up your position calculations. What saved me tons of headaches was converting both cursor position and range boundaries to a common reference system - paragraph indices plus character offsets. Way more reliable than working directly with element references. Also, cursor detection acts differently in suggestion mode vs edit mode, so test thoroughly across different document states.
I hit this same issue building a collaborative editor. You’ll want to combine DocumentApp.getActiveDocument().getCursor() with getNamedRanges(), but watch out for the range comparison logic - it’s trickier than it looks.
Here’s what worked: grab the cursor element and offset, then loop through your named ranges to see if the cursor sits between start and end elements. Multi-paragraph ranges are the pain point. Use getRangeElements() on each range and compare both element indices and text offsets.
Fair warning - performance tanks with lots of named ranges. Cache them if your document structure stays pretty static.
totally get it! there isn’t a direct method for this. you have to use getNamedRanges() and loop through to see if the cursor is within any. it’s a bit of a hassle but you can make it work!