The more I use the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI), the more I am impressed with it. I have been converting my JQuery imValidateForm plugin to a YUI widget for a project that I am working on. I ran into a scope issue when a button was clicked. I have dealt with Javascript scope issues in the past, but I did not know how to fix it using YUI.  For those of you who are not familiar, the ‘this’ keyword within a function refers to the object itself.

function artist() {
     this.name = ‘Bob Marley’;
}

In the example above, the ‘this’ keyword refers to the artist object. Here’s a more complex example:

function cart(id) {
     this.selectedItem = id;
     var btnSubmit = document.getElementById(‘submit’);
     btnSubmit.onclick = function() {
          var selected = this.selectedItem;
     };
}

Javascript does not know what ‘this.selectedItem’ is because the ‘this’ is in the scope of the btnSubmit object. To get around the scope issue, I can do the following:

function cart(id) {
     this.selectedItem = id;
     var self = this;
     var btnSubmit = document.getElementById(‘submit’);
     btnSubmit.onclick = function() {
          var selected = self.selectedItem;
     }
}

‘self’ is the cart object, not the submit button. Simple scope correction. But there are times when Javascript applications become so complex that scope correction is not this easy. In these situations, I have to do more than add self = this. I found a simple function that handles scope correction:

function cart(id) {
     this.selectedItem = id;
     var self = this;
     var btnSubmit = document.getElementById(‘submit’);
     btnSubmit.onclick = function() {
          bindCallBack(getAlbums, self, self.selectedItem);
     }
     this.getAlbums = function(id) {
 
     };
}
function bindCallBack(fn, scope) {
     var args = [];
     for (var n = 1; n < arguments.length; n++)
          args.push(arguments[n]);
     return function () { return fn.apply(scope, args); };
}

Without the bindCallBack function, the button would be able to ‘see’ the getAlbums method because it is out of scope. (Note: I can also use the bindCallBack function to pass parameters to the getAlbums).

The YUI way

So I didn’t want to deal with scope correction when creating my YUI widget, but as it turns out, I did not have to because YUI has automatic scope correction.

function cart() {
     this.selectedItem = null;
     var btnSubmit = YAHOO.utils.Dom.get(‘submit’);
     btnSubmit.on("click", this.getAlbums, this, true);
     this.getAlbums = function() {
 
     };
}

By adding ‘this’ (the cart object) and ‘true’ to the click event, the execution scope of the button click is now the cart object. Easy. Try it yourself.