Question

I’m using jQuery with Django to do some stuff with tables. I have the following javascript:

$("#pending_table").tablesorter({
    headers: {5 + {{somevariable}}: {sorter:false},6 + {{somevariable}}: {sorter:false}}
});

(I omitted a bunch of other options that are irrelevant)

The part that’s causing trouble is the addition in the headers dictionary definition. Looking at the source of the resulting webpage, I can see that {{somevariable}} converts properly to its value of 4, so it’s not a Django-related issue.

In summary: “5 + 4 : value” does not work, “9 : value” does work.

I’m assuming I’m getting the syntax of the javascript wrong somehow.

Help?

Answer 1

Javascript object literals only allows literals as keys. In other words, you cannot have a calculated expression as a key. For example, this is unallowed:

headers = {
  (1 + 2): 4
}

That said, you can do this to circumvent that restriction:

headers = {};
headers[1 + 2] = 4;

In your case, it looks like you want to do something like this:

var headers = {};
headers[5 + someVar] = {sorter: false};
headers[6 + someVar] = {sorter: false};
$("#pending_table").tablesorter({    
  headers: headers   
});