Question

I have to work through some code and found the following function, which I do not understand. What does hintContainer, it grabs the return-value of each() and it seems that this object should be placed inside the callback-function?

Thanks in advance for any guesses, unfortunately I cannot contact the developer. In short, the function should grab all divs with the class userHinterPanel und should show them.

function prepareHintMessages() {
// gets all userHintePanels
var hintContainer = jQuery('div.userHintPanel').each(function() {
    hintContainer = jQuery(this);
    // hint content div
    var hintContent = hintContainer.next();
    // hint content text
    var closeText = hintContainer.find('div.closeTextContainer');
    // inserts text into the content container
    hintContent.insertBefore(closeText);
    // show the complete hint panel
    hintContainer.parent().show();
});
}

UPDATE HTML Snippet, this is the info-Box:

<form id="form" name="form" method="post"
action="xxx.jsf"
enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" class="newPatientForm">
<div id="form_showAllHintsContainer" class="showAllHintsContainer"
    onclick="jQuery('#form_showAllUserHints').click();"
    title="Alle verfügbaren Hinweise auf dieser Seite einblenden">
    ?<input class="hidden" id="form_showAllUserHints"
        name="form_showAllUserHints"
        onclick="A4J.AJAX.Submit('form',event,{'oncomplete':function(request,event,data){prepareHintMessages();},'similarityGroupingId':'form_showAllUserHints','parameters':{'userPrefActionParamShow':'NEW_PATIENT_HINT','form_showAllUserHints':'form_showAllUserHints'} } );return false;"
        value="showUserHints" type="button" />
</div>
<div class="generalPadding">
    <div id="form_hintRerenderContainer">
        <div id="form_newPatientHintWithIsh"
            class="userHintPanelContainer newPatient">
            <div id="form_newPatientHintWithIshHintPanel"
                class="alert-message block-message warning userHintPanel">
                <a href="#" onclick="closeHintMessage(this);"
                    title="Hinweis ausblenden" class="close">×</a>
                <div class="header">Hinweis</div>
                <div class="text">
                    <div class="closeTextContainer"
                        style="position: relative; height: 20px;">
                        <a href="#" onclick="closeHintMessage(this);"
                            style="font-size: 14px;" class="close"> Hinweis ausblenden</a>
                    </div>
                </div>
                <input class="hidden hideHintButton"
                    id="form_newPatientHintWithIshHintPanelHideButton"
                    name="form_newPatientHintWithIshHintPanelHideButton"
                    onclick="A4J.AJAX.Submit('form',event,{'similarityGroupingId':'form_newPatientHintWithIshHintPanelHideButton','parameters':{'form_newPatientHintWithIshHintPanelHideButton':'form_newPatientHintWithIshHintPanelHideButton','userPrefActionParam':'NEW_PATIENT_HINT'} } );return false;"
                    value="hideUserHints" type="button" />
            </div>
            <div class="hintContent">
                <ul>...</ul>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>

Answer 1

It graps all elements with class “userHintPanel” and adds some content just before the close text container and after that shows all prepared userHintPanels

One thing:

   var closeText = hintContainer.find('div.closeTextContainer'); is a bit strange. 

It targets something that looks like this:

   <div class="closeTextContainer">Panel x Close</div>

But in your code it won’t grab the text, but the element itself. Did the developer mean this perhaps?

    var closeText = hintContainer.find('div.closeTextContainer').text(); 

If it’s really the intend to to grab the element, better rename the var to ‘closeTextElement’ for better understanding of the code.

Another weird thing:

var hintContent = hintContainer.next();

This will result in that at the last userHintPanel, hintContent is ‘undefined’. Is that the intend?

Another very important thing:

Is the parent of userHintPanel an iFrame? If that’s the case the following statement will fail for sure in Safari:

   hintContainer.parent()

The error you should get is: SCRIPT5022: DOM Exception: HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR (3)