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I’ve been making more and more use of dojo.query. In case you’re not familiar with it, it basically allows you to query the dom using css syntax. It returns a NodeList which is an array of dom nodes with some extra dojo goodness built in. Like many (all?) of the dojo array processing functions, some of which I discussed here. NodeList also has some handy methods like addClass, removeClass, toggleClass, style, addContent, and a few others. NodeList.attr will set an attribute on every node in the nodelist. Very handy, but there’s no NodeList.removeAttr, I’m not sure why. I needed this functionality in a bunch of places. At first I was just using NodeList.forEach, but then I realized it would be better to just extend NodeList like so:

dojo.extend(dojo.NodeList, {
  removeAttr: function(attribute){
    this.forEach(function(x) { dojo.removeAttr(x, attribute); });
  }
});

That little bit of code adds the removeAttr function to NodeList! Now I can just do this:

dojo.query('foo').removeAttr('bar');

I’m doing something else with this that I think is interesting. I’m using alternative syntax (that probably has a name but I don’t know what it is) to reduce the amount of code I’m writing. For instance, instead of writing this:

if (valid)
{
  dojo.query('.detailSaveButton').removeAttr('disabled');
}
else
{
  dojo.query('.detailSaveButton').attr('disabled', 'disabled');
}

I’m doing this:

var action = (valid) ? 'removeAttr' : 'attr';
dojo.query('.detailSaveButton')[action]('disabled', 'disabled');

Note that the second argument being passed in will be ignored if action == ‘removeAttr’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under dojo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.