TinyMCE - applying a style over bullets and multiple paragraphs applies the style to each bullet & para - how do I avoid? - tinymce

Question

I'm trying to use the theme_advanced_styles command within TinyMCE to add classes to selections of text within the TinyMCE editor. The problem is that if the paragraph contains bullets, then the style is applied throughout them (as well as to each individual paragraph).
What I want is just for the entire selection I made to have the style class added to the start of it. Ie if my style class is 'expandCollapse' I want:
<p class="expandCollapse">some content... some content... some content... some content... som content... some content... some content...
<ul>
<li>asdsadsadsadsasda</li>
<li>asdsadsa</li>
<li>sada</li>
</ul>
asome content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... </p>
But what I get is:
<p class="expandCollapse">some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content...
<ul>
<li class="expandCollapse">asdsadsadsadsasda</li>
<li class="expandCollapse">asdsadsa</li>
<li class="expandCollapse">sada</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p class="expandCollapse">asome content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... some content... </p>
Any ideas anyone?!

Answer 1

So I had to answer my own question as I needed an answer very quickly. It appears the behaviour I was experiencing is intentional? and certainly not something that has been removed in the very latest versions of TinyMCE (both 3.x and 4.x after testing).
With this in mind I ended up having to make a plugin to do what I wanted.
I borrowed a huge amount of code by Peter Wilson, from a post he made here: http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=20319 So thanks very much for this Peter!
I ended up slightly changing the rules from my original question in that my solution adds an outer wrapping div around all the content I want to select. This method also allowed me to reliably then grab the required areas of html with jQuery in my front-end site.
My version of Peter's code is just very slightly modified from the original in order to add a class to the DIV, rename it, use a different button etc.
The plugin works perfectly and allows for a div to be created wrapping any amount of content within TinyMCE. The divs inserted have the class name I need also applied to it.
Add 'customDiv' to your plugin AND button bar for it to appear.
(function() {
tinymce.create("tinymce.plugins.Div", {
init : function(editor, url) {
editor.addCommand("mceWrapDiv", function() {
var ed = this, s = ed.selection, dom = ed.dom, sb, eb, n, div, bm, r, i;
// Get start/end block
sb = dom.getParent(s.getStart(), dom.isBlock);
eb = dom.getParent(s.getEnd(), dom.isBlock);
// If the document is empty then there can't be anything to wrap.
if (!sb && !eb) {
return;
}
// If empty paragraph node then do not use bookmark
if (sb != eb || sb.childNodes.length > 1 || (sb.childNodes.length == 1 && sb.firstChild.nodeName != 'BR'))
bm = s.getBookmark();
// Move selected block elements into a new DIV - positioned before the first block
tinymce.each(s.getSelectedBlocks(s.getStart(), s.getEnd()), function(e) {
// If this is the first node then we need to create the DIV along with the following dummy paragraph.
if (!div) {
div = dom.create('div',{'class' : 'expandCollapse'});
e.parentNode.insertBefore(div, e);
// Insert an empty dummy paragraph to prevent people getting stuck in a nested block. The dummy has a '-'
// in it to prevent it being removed as an empty paragraph.
var dummy = dom.create('p');
e.parentNode.insertBefore(dummy, e);
//dummy.innerHTML = '-';
}
// Move this node to the new DIV
if (div!=null)
div.appendChild(dom.remove(e));
});
if (!bm) {
// Move caret inside empty block element
if (!tinymce.isIE) {
r = ed.getDoc().createRange();
r.setStart(sb, 0);
r.setEnd(sb, 0);
s.setRng(r);
} else {
s.select(sb);
s.collapse(1);
}
} else
s.moveToBookmark(bm);
});
editor.addButton("customDiv", {
//title: "<div>",
image: url + '/customdiv.gif',
cmd: "mceWrapDiv",
title : 'Wrap content in expand/collapse element'
});
}
});
tinymce.PluginManager.add("customDiv", tinymce.plugins.Div);
})();