Question

I have a plugin I am writing that accepts options. It looks something like this.

$('#myObject').myPlugin({
    option1: someValue
});

Where somevalue can either be a value, a control id, or a function.

I have a default settings defined like this

var settings = {
    option1: null
};

Then, inside my plugin I use this to merge what the user passes in with my empty settings object

if (options) {
    $.extend(settings, options);
}

This works fine when the option is a control ID or value.

My first issue is when I use a function like this

$('#myObject').myPlugin({
    option1: function(){ return doStuff(); }
});

$.extend() seems to ignore the function in this case. The default value from settings is always passed into my parser. I’m also having a problem when I pass in a value instead of a control id. I parse the settings to get the value like this

function parseValue(value, defaultValue) {
    if ($.isFunction(value))
        return value();

    if (!value)
        return defaultValue ? defaultValue : '';

    if ($('#' + value))
        return $('#' + value).val();

    return value;
};

if I pass in a date or a decimal, $('#' + value) evaluates to true.

Any ideas on how I make this work?

EDIT:

This may be wrong, but this is how I defined my plugin. It’s actually a collection of plugins

(function ($) {

    //shared methods here
    function parseValue(value, defaultValue) { /*...*/ }

    $.fn.myplugin = function (options) {
        var settings = { };

        $(this).live("submit", function (event) {
            //NEVER EVER EVER allow the form to submit to the server
            event.preventDefault();

            //logic for "posting" cross domain
        });
    };

    $.fn.myplugin2 = function (options) {
        var settings = { };

        $(this).live("submit", function (event) {
            //NEVER EVER EVER allow the form to submit to the server
            event.preventDefault();

            //logic for "posting" cross domain
        });
    };

})(jQuery);

The plugins hijack a form and make it submit cross domain through a jsonp get request. Each plugin submits different data to a different url, but the overall logic is the same.

Answer 1

I found out what I was doing wrong.

The selector test I was doing was always returning false because jquery doesn’t return undefined if nothing was found. So, I changed my parser to look like this:

function parseValue(value, defaultValue) {
    if ($.isFunction(value))
        return value();

    if (!value)
        return defaultValue;

    if ($.type(value) === 'string' && $(value).length)
        return $(value).val();

    return value;
};

and my code now looks something like this

$.fn.myPlugin= function (options) {

    var settings = {
        setting1: undefined
    }

    $(this).live('click', function{
        var setting = parseValue(settings.setting1, '');
    });
}

and now all three types (value, selector, or function) can be passed in as my query options.