Question

Is it possible to define multiple variables with a single jQuery chain?

var sectionTable = jQuery("#sectionsTable");
var sectionTableRows = sectionTable.find("tr");
var sectionTableColumns = sectionTableRows.find("td");

I don’t know what the syntax would be if it is possible but if you took the 3 variables above how could you chain them and would it be considered good practice?

Many thanks

Chris

EDIT: Wow, thanks for all the comments. Sorry for being vague, what I was after was a better way (if one exists) of defining child variables from a parent variable. That’s why I thought of using the chain and wondered if a way existed. Thanks for the great advice.

Answer 1

If you really want to, anything is possible :

Of the top of my head, you could try to do something like this :

var sectionTable,
    sectionTableRows, 
    sectionTableColumns = $('td', (sectionTableRows = $('tr',(sectionTable = $('#sectionsTable')))));

Another ideea would be to build a mini-plugin that assigns the current jquery object to a certain field of an object :

jQuery.fn.assignTo = function(variableName,namespace){
    var ns = namespace || window;
    ns[variableName] = this;
    return this;
}

With this peace of code you could do the following :

var sections = {};
jQuery("#sectionsTable")
    .assignTo('sectionTable',sections)
    .find("tr")
        .assignTo('sectionTableRows',sections)
        .find("td")
            .assignTo('sectionTableColumns',sections);

console.log(sections.sectionTable);
console.log(sections.sectionTableRows);
console.log(sections.sectionTableColumns);

Of course, if you do not specify any namespace, the variables will be global (will be attached to the window object);

Any way, I do not encourage you to use these examples, because it doesn’t make very much sense to worsen your code’s readability in favour of fewer equal signs and var declarations.