Question

I’m really new to Javascript and I’m having some trouble understanding how to get the following to work. My goal is to have a certain Javascript action execute when a page loads and a variable added to the end of the URL would trigger which Javascript action to execute. The URL of the page that I’m looking to implement this on is http://www.morgantoolandsupply.com/catalog.php. Each of the “+expand” buttons, which are Javascript driven, drop-down a certain area of the page. Ultimately, I would like to be able to create a URL that would automatically drop-down a certain category when the page loads. Could anybody explain to me the process to do this? Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

You’ve already got the function to call: toggle2(), which takes two parameters that happen to be identical for all categories except for a number at the end. So create a URL that includes that number: http://www.morgantoolandsupply.com/catalog.php#cat=4

Then find that number in location.hash using a regular expression. This one is robust enough to handle multiple url parameters, should you decide to use them in the future: /[\#&]cat=(\d+)/. But, if you expect to never add anything else to the url, you could use a very simple one like /(\d+)/.

Once you’ve got the number, it’s a simple matter of using that number to create your two parameters and calling toggle2().

This should work:

window.onload = function() {
    if (/[\#&]cat=(\d+)/.test(location.hash)) {
        var cat = parseInt(RegExp.$1);
        if (cat > 0 && cat < 13) {
            toggle2("toggle"+cat, "displayText"+cat);
        }
    }
}