Question

I have a little quandary over whether it is good practice to do the following.

I have a global object literal or namespace that I use to contain base functions and variables.

Within this I have a Page property which contains all the variables and functions for a specific page. I also contain references to element IDs in a property within the Page property. This is due to having an ASP.NET site whereby I need to store the .NET-generated client IDs so I can reference them with jQuery.

Base
    Base.Page
        Base.Page.Elements

My issue is that I find myself assigning “shortcut” variables to these literals within my page functions such as the following:

Base.Page.DoThisStuff = function () {
    var p = Base.Page;
    var pe = Base.Page.Elements;

    //Function Stuff Here

    p = null;
    pe = null;
}

My question is: Is it a better idea to create a ‘global’ variable in my master page, such as var _p = Base.Page; or is this horrible and bad practice and I should continue as above?

(My namespaces don’t have names as short as the above – they are just for illustration.

I have not tagged ASP.NET or jQuery as I don’t think they directly relate to this question.)

Answer 1

This really seems to me a question of programming style, and each answer will vary.

I would keep my variables in as smaller a scope as possible, hence, I would prefer the solution above rather then the global variables shortcuts idea.