Question

For the purpose of this question lets say we need to append() 1000 objects to the body element.

You could go about it like this:

for(x = 0; x < 1000; x++) {
    var element = $('<div>'+x+'</div>');
    $('body').append(element);
}

This works, however it seems inefficient to me as AFAIK this will cause 1000 document reflows. A better solution would be:

var elements = [];
for(x = 0; x < 1000; x++) {
    var element = $('<div>'+x+'</div>');
    elements.push(element);
}
$('body').append(elements);

However this is not an ideal world and this throws an error Could not convert JavaScript argument arg 0 [nsIDOMDocumentFragment.appendChild]. I understand that append() can’t handle arrays.

How would I using jQuery (I know about the DocumentFragment node, but assume I need to use other jQuery functions on the element such as .css()) add a bunch of objects to the DOM at once to improve performance?

Answer 1

You could use an empty jQuery object instead of an array:

var elements = $();
for(x = 0; x < 1000; x++) {
    elements = elements.add('<div>'+x+'</div>');
    // or 
    // var element = $('<div>'+x+'</div>');
    // elements = elements.add(element);
}
$('body').append(elements);

This might be useful if you want to do stuff with newly generated element inside the loop. But note that this will create a huge internal stack of elements (inside the jQuery object).

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It seems though that your code works perfectly fine with jQuery 1.8.