Question

If I have a function in SSJS and I want to pass one “firm” parameter and a list of others that can change, what’s the best way to do that? With some kind of hashMap or JSON or something else?

for example given something like:

myfunction( code:string, paramList:??) {
// do stuff here

}

Basically the function will create a document. And sometimes I’ll have certain fields I’ll want to pass in right away and populate and other times I’ll have different fields I will want to populate.

How would you pass them in and then parse out in the function?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Use the arguments parameter… In JavaScript you are not required to define any of your parameters in the function block itself. So, for example, the following call:

myFunction(arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4);

can legally be passed to the following function:

myFunction () {
  // do stuff here...
}

when I do this, I usually place a comment in the parens to indicate I am expecting variable arguments:

myFunction (/* I am expecting variable arguments to be passed here */) {
  // do stuff here...
}

Then, you can access those arguments like this:

myFunction (/* I am expecting variable arguments to be passed here */) {
  if (arguments.length == 0) {
    // naughty naughty, you were supposed to send me things...
    return null;
  }

  myExpectedFirstArgument = arguments[0];

  // maybe do something here with myExpectedFirstArgument
  var whatEvah:String = myExpectedFirstArgument + ":  "

  for (i=1;i<arguments.length;i++) {
    // now do something with the rest of the arguments, one 
    // at a time using arguments[i]
    whatEvah = whatEvah + " and " + arguments[i];
  }

  // peace.
  return whatEvah;
}

Wallah, variable arguments.

But, more to the point of your question, I don’t think you need to actually send variable arguments, nor go through the hassle of creating actual JSON (which is really a string interpretation of a javascript object), just create and send the actual object then reference as an associative array to get your field names and field values:

var x = {};
x.fieldName1 = value1;
x.fieldName2 = value2;
// ... etc ...

then in your function, which now needs only two parameters:

myFunction(arg1, arg2) {
   // do whatever with arg1

   for (name in arg2) {
     // name is now "fieldName1" or "fieldName2"
     alert(name + ": " + x[name]);
   }

}

Hope this helps.