Question

I’m building a wrapper for the HTML5 File(Reader) API with a fallback to normal file inputs or swfupload.

I have one general function “Uploader” and three sub functions (all in the same scope)

function Uploader() { }

function UploaderAPI() { }

function UploaderSWF() { }

function UploaderHTML() { }

The idea is that you create a var uploader = new Uploader() and that function calls one of the subfunctions, based on feature support/configuration.

However, I was wondering if there’s a way to prevent users from directly calling one of the subfunctions, and instead have them only available to Uploader().

Is this doable without moving them to the Uploader scope?

Answer 1

You could use the module pattern and define those functions as private methods (through closure) but this will move your functions inside another scope.

e.g.

var Uploader = function() {

   var UploaderAPI = function() { alert('uploaderAPI'); };

   var UploaderSWF = function() { alert('uploaderSWF');  };

   var UploaderHTML = function() {  alert('uploaderHTML'); };

   return {

      /* expose public methods here */

      publicMethodAPI : function() {
          alert('public uploaderAPI');
          UploaderAPI();
      }
   };
};

Doing so you can choose to make some public methods available along with an instance and use those function inside it, but without call them directly e.g.

var myupl = new Uploader();
myupl.publicMethodAPI();

Example (working) fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/ndQFB/