Mike Haggerty

I’m not a very good JavaScript programmer, but today I decided to try and become a little bit better. My usual JavaScript methods involve a lot of hackery. One of the things I have never found a good solution for is passing arguments to a function. With the help of jQuery, today I found what I think to be a pretty good solution.

The technique is pretty simple: pass an options object to the function you’re calling (or don’t), create a default arguments object at the top of your function in question, and use jQuery’s extend function to merge the two.

Here’s some code to help explain:

/*
 * call the function with some options
 *
 * will alert:
 * option1: whatup
 * option2: false
 * option3: 2
 * option1: "andhow"
 */
mySweetFunction({
   option1: "whatup",
   option2: false,
   option3: 2
});
 
/*
 * call the function without any options
 *
 * will alert:
 * option1: sillystring
 * option2: true
 * option3: 100
 * option1: "andhow"
 */
mySweetFunction();
 
// the function in question
function mySweetFunction(options) {
   // establish the default values
   var args = {
      option1: "sillystring",
      option2: true,
      option3: 100,
      option4: "andhow"
   };
 
   // use jQuery's extend function to merge
   // args and options, modifying args.
   $.extend(args, options);
 
   alert("option1: " + args.option1);
   alert("option2: " + args.option2);
   alert("option3: " + args.option3);
   alert("option4: " + args.option4);
}

The Virginia Healthcare and Hospital Association needed an application built that could tie together all of the hospitals in the Commonwealth of Virginia for purposes of status notification and disaster alerting. Due to the complex nature of the system, only a custom-developed web based application would do the job. I was the chief architect of the system from the database model to the fluid user interface.

Employer: SiteVision, Inc.

Skills: jQuery, SQL Server, ColdFusion, Fusebox, ORM

URL: https://www.vhha-mci.org (password protected)

Time invested: 6 months

Clean, commented Fusebox XML code

The status board refreshes every two minutes