Question

It seems to me that jQuery’s .data() function is more of a write-once store than true read-write-storage.

There does not seem to be a comfortable way of updating complex values.

Let’s suppose one wants to use some elements in a double-linked list (not my use case, illustrative purpose only).

It would be easy if I would do:

$elem.data('prev', $prev);
$elem.data('next', $next);

But I feel it is bad practice to pollute the “global” .data() namespace of an element.

So I would rather do:

$elem.data('list', {prev: $prev, next: $next});

But how do I now update prev?

In the first example, I would just do:

$elem.data('prev', $newPrev);

But in the in my opinion “nicer” way of doing things the only thing I can think of is something like this:

$elem.data('list', {prev: $newPrev, next: $elem.data('list').next});

This seems a lot more cumbersome to me and I suspect there is a better way, but so far I was unable to find anything.

How should I go about this?

Answer 1

When you call jQuery’s data method with one argument, you get a reference to the stored object, which you can update directly using regular . notation:

$elem.data('list').prev = $newPrev;

Thanks @balpha