Question

I’ve created an object literal of jQuery animations and I’m looking for a succinct way of passing this to animate().

Unfortunately, .apply() doesn’t seem to work with animate() so I’ve had to resort to using the indexes – I’m wondering why this is and how I can get it to work with .apply().

var animations = {

    slideLeft : function (moveLeft) {

        return [{
                left: moveLeft
            }, {
                duration: 300,
                easing: 'swingy'
        }];

    }
};

$randomEl.animate.apply(this, animations.slideLeft(100)); // doesn't work

$randomEl.animate(animations.slideLeft(100)[0], animations.slideLeft(100)[1]); // does work

Answer 1

You have to pass the right value for this to apply. I assume this works:

$randomEl.animate.apply($randomEl, animations.slideLeft(100));

If you call animate normally, like $randomEl.animate(...), then inside animate, this will refer to $randomEl. Hence you have to pass $randomEl as first argument to apply and not whatever this refers to.

See the MDN documentation for more information.