OO JS Issue

[Twinkie]

I am experimenting with object oriented javascript, and I ran into a simple problem. Within a method of an object called by an event, this does not reffer to the object but rather to the caller (in this case, an HTMLLIElement). How can I call another method within a method called by on onclick event?

Problem exemplified here. When I click on the open button, it can't call this.load() because this is referring to the li elements clicked. Any workarounds?

[essellar]

"this" in JavaScript refers to the execution context, so the only time it will consistently refer to the object is when the object is constructed. You can assign the function to a variable during construction rather than merely inlining the function:

function myObject() {
this.load = function (param) {doSomething(param); doSomethingElse();};
}

Forget everything you may know about OOP from Java, C++, C# and so on. JavaScript is very different, even if the syntax looks similar. I'd suggest looking at these sites before going too much further: Douglas Crockford on JavaScript and Eloquent JavaScript.

[Twinkie]

Thank you for the links, but I have read an OO JavaScript tutorial and feel that I have a firm grasp on the concepts involved. I also understand why my example page is not working, but I do not know a solution. Is there any workarounds to reference the current object when the executive context is the not the object reference?

I have an idea of making the event handler reference a function which uses the object reference to access the method, but that will get very repetitive.

[Twinkie]

Actually, I found the solution. Using 'function() {list.save()}' works. If there is a better solution, I am all ears.

Thanks for the tut, I see it goes into a lot more depth than the other ones I have seen. w3schools.com in particular is looking worse and worse every day.

[essellar]

There was a time when I "knew" JavaScript (been using it since NSN 2 and had ECMA-262 memorized) and I "knew" OOP (I did it for a living) and couldn't glue them together. JavaScript's syntax put my mind into a particular mode of thinking, and it was difficult to break out of it, even as I began to learn that it is a lot closer to Lisp in character than it is to, say, Java. I needed both of those sites to bend my mind enough to make a bit of progress. Of course, now that my mind is truly bent, I'm not fit company for man nor beast, but...

[misson]

Actually, I found the solution. Using 'function() {list.save()}' works. If there is a better solution, I am all ears.

That's pretty much it, though there are different forms. You need a closure to bind the object to the method. More generally, you can write a function to create this binding:

function bind(self, meth) {
    if (typeof meth == 'string') {
        meth = self[meth];
    }
    return function () {
        return meth.apply(self, arguments);
    }
}

...
$('open').addEventListener('click', bind(load, load.open), false);
$('save').addEventListener('click', bind(load, 'save'), false);

You just have to be careful you don't introduce a memory leak.

Thanks for the tut, I see it goes into a lot more depth than the other ones I have seen.

You might also want to take a look at Jibbering's Javascript Closures article. It covers this very specific but broadly useful topic.

w3schools.com in particular is looking worse and worse every day.

True dat.

[Twinkie]

That's pretty much it, though there are different forms. You need a closure to bind the object to the method. More generally, you can write a function to create this binding:

function bind(self, meth) {
    if (typeof meth == 'string') {
        meth = self[meth];
    }
    return function () {
        return meth.apply(self, arguments);
    }
}

...
$('open').addEventListener('click', bind(load, load.open), false);
$('save').addEventListener('click', bind(load, 'save'), false);

I am sorry, but I don't understand what the parameters for the bind function are on the last two lines? Could you explain?

[Twinkie]

There was a time when I "knew" JavaScript (been using it since NSN 2 and had ECMA-262 memorized) and I "knew" OOP (I did it for a living) and couldn't glue them together. JavaScript's syntax put my mind into a particular mode of thinking, and it was difficult to break out of it, even as I began to learn that it is a lot closer to Lisp in character than it is to, say, Java. I needed both of those sites to bend my mind enough to make a bit of progress. Of course, now that my mind is truly bent, I'm not fit company for man nor beast, but...

I also learned JavaScript first before moving on to heavier languages like Java, but I found it much easier to accept different programming concepts than you did. Maybe this was because I had the 'benefit' of not learning it all at once, but instead being strung through many different minor tutorials.

[misson]

I am sorry, but I don't understand what the parameters for the bind function are on the last two lines? Could you explain?

The first argument to bind is an object. The second is a function or name of an object property that's a method.

var thing = {
  foo: function () {
    return this.value ='foo';
  },
  function bar() {
    return this.value = 'bar';
  }
};
function baz() {
    return this.value = 'baz';
}

var thingfoo = bind(thing, 'foo'),
    thingbar = bind(thing, thing.bar);
    thingbaz = bind(thing, baz);

[essellar]

I also learned JavaScript first before moving on to heavier languages like Java, but I found it much easier to accept different programming concepts than you did.

I didn't start with JavaScript. Before I met JS for the first time, I'd worked with FORTRAN, machine language (and assembler) on TI99000s, 6502s and Z80s, several flavours of BASIC and Pascal, Lisp, SmallTalk, C/C++ and APL -- all for a living, and all before the WWW or JavaScript existed. I'd even had a go at a small portable language for embedded systems that had recently been renamed "Java".

JS isn't hard -- it's that the language syntax looks like an ALGOL-derived language like C or Java, but its underlying characteristics are much more like Lisp (or, more specifically, Lingo -- the variety of Lisp that Macromedia used in Director and Authorware -- due to a heavy reliance on runtime environment objects). Gluing JS and OOP together successfully means understanding closures, anonymous functions and prototypes and forgetting about classes and interfaces. Most of the experienced programmers I know had trouble with JavaScript object behaviour until they became able to overlook the superficial similarity to languages they were already coding objects in.