Question

I have an onclick handler for an <a> element (actually, it’s a jQuery-created handler, but that’s not important). It looks like this:

function handleOnClick() {     if(confirm('Are you sure?')) {         return handleOnClickConfirmed();     }     return false; } 

From this function, the this object is accessable as the <a> element clicked. However, handleOnClickConfirmed’s this is a Window element! I want handleOnClickConfirmed to have the same this as handleOnClick does. How would I do this?

(I know I can pass this as an argument to handleOnClickConfirmed, but some of my code already uses handleOnClickConfirmed and I don’t want to have to rewrite those calls. Besides, I think using this looks cleaner.)

Answer 1

The following ought to do it:

function handleOnClick() {     if( confirm( 'Sure?' ) ) {         return handleOnClickConfirmed.call( this );     }     return false; } 

The call() function attached to Function objects is designed to allow this; calling a function with a desired context. It’s an extremely useful trick when setting up event handlers that call back into functions within other objects.