Question

I was going through some java code(which uses playframework) that provides some shopping cart functionality.The html page contains some javascript (it uses jquery) which is something I have very little knowledge of.Looking through the html,I found a table like this

<table>
...
<td> 
<a href="" onclick="return addItem(${item.id});">buy</a>
</td>
...
</table>

(The template uses ${} to get dynamic values thru playframework template language)
In the entire code ,the only addItem(itemId) method I could find was in the ShoppingCart class which has this signature

public void addItem(Item item) {
...
}

When I searched for onclick ,I found this page
onclick doc,which gives the syntax of onclick as

onclick="SomeJavaScriptCode"

Going thru all the javascript code(it uses jquery and ejohn-templating)I couldn’t find any method like ‘addItem’

So,how does the onclick work?How would it know which method to invoke?Will it look in the entire code (javascript and java)to find a matching method?

Answer 1

First is it would only look for javascript methods and not java methods. Second is you can use debugging in firebug to reach to the method called.