Question

I am trying to use a jQuery extension I came across (handsontable). I am having no problem creating the table

var spreadsheet = $("#dataTable").handsontable({
            rows: 3,
            cols: 15,
            minSpareRows: 2
});

However after I create the table I want to call various helper functions I see declared in the javascript for the Handsontable object. The problem is the extension seems to return this.each(function() { ... }); and I don’t understand how I can access the underlaying Handsontable object from this. The js for the extension can be found here and I put a small demo together on the following link

http://jsfiddle.net/7JTG2/7/

as you can see I would like get the data of one of the cells when I click a button.

Answer 1

The relevant code is in the end:

$.fn.handsontable = function (action, options) {
    if (typeof action !== 'string') { //init
        options = action;
        return this.each(function () {
            if($(this).data("handsontable")) {
                instance = $(this).data("handsontable");
                ...
            } else {
                   ...
                instance = new Handsontable($(this), currentSettings);
                $(this).data("handsontable", instance);
            }
        });
    }
}

That means, the code sets the Handsontable instances as a data attribute to the elements (and returns the selected set to be chainable). Having one element, you can easily extract it with instance = $el.data("handsontable"). If you have a set of elements, you will need to loop over it – e.g. with each().