Question

guys. I’m developing a jQuery plugin that wraps an element inside a container. So, this line:

$azureRectangle.container(); //azureRectangle is only an empty div

Produces this:

The container is composed with many new divs. Well, here is my doubt: How should I name or identify those created divs? Should I use a data attribute or an invented id or name?

Answer 1

Well, there are several policies for that. You certainly can use either ‘data’ or ‘rev’ attributes, but then you might have difficulties when trying to select a specific container element.

Usually, though, wrapper (and replacer) plugins work with elements with id attribute set, so they can generate a corresponding id for the elements they create. For example:

$.fn.somePlugin = function(someId) {
  var somePluginId = 'some-plugin-' + someId;
  ...
}

This allows both grapping all items (with '[id^="some-plugin-"]' selector) and each specific one (having an id of element which was involved in its creation).

The same policy, of course, can be applied when more then one new element should be created; you just have to use several specific prefixes for these.