Question

I am trying to develop a plugin for jQuery. This is my first plugin, and I am stuck in the initial phase.

I need to do following things: I need to find the “add row” link from the table and bind to the click event. When the link is clicked, it should add a new row by cloning the existing template row. Initially the template row is hidden.

Following is the HTML.

<table id='grid1'>
    <tr>
        <td><a href='#' id='add_row'>Add New Row</a></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>
            <table id='data_table'>
                <tr><th>Col1</th><th>Col2</th><th>Col3</th></tr>
                <tr><td>Data1</td><td>Data2</td><td>Col3</td></tr>
                <tr id='template_row'>
                   <td><input type='text' /></td>
                   <td><input type='text' /></td>
                   <td><input type='text' /></td>
                </tr>
            </table>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

And my jQuery so far:

(function($) {
  $.extend($.fn, {
    editableGrid: function() {
      function addRow() {
        //code to clone here but i need the instance of main table here ie grid1
      }
      this.find('#add_row').bind("click",addRow);
    }
  });   
})(jQuery);

Answer 1

Going on from your current code:

(function($) {
  $.extend($.fn, {
    editableGrid: function() {
      this.find("a.add_row").click(function () {
        var $table  = $(this).parent("table").find("table.data_table");
        var $newRow = $table.find("tr.template_row").clone();

        $newRow.removeClass("template_row"); // !!!
        $table.append($newRow);
        return false;
      });
    }
  });   
})(jQuery);

Notes

• work with CSS classes instead of IDs – only that way you can have multiple “editable grids” on one page
• there is no benefit of using bind() over using click() here
• you can pass functions directly as arguments – no need to define them separately
• it can improve readability/clarity to use verbose selectors ("a.add_row" is better than just ".add_row")
• in the outer function, this refers to a jQuery object containing all matched elements, so click() binds all of them in one step.
• in the inner function, this refers to an individual DOM element (i.e. the clicked link) – it is not a jQuery object here!
• don’t forget to return false from the click function to prevent the browser default behavior
• it’s useful to prepend variables with a $ to denote that they contain a jQuery object