Question

Let’s say I instantiate an object in Javascript like this:

var myObj = new someObject();

Now, is it possible to obtain the var object’s name as string 'myObj' from within one of the class methods?

---

Additional details (edited):

The reason why I would like to get the name of the variable holding reference to the object is that my new myObj would create a new clickable DIV on the page that would need to call a function myObj.someFunction(). As I insert the new DIV I need to know the name of the variable holding reference to the object. Is there maybe a better way of doing this?

---

You are right, sorry for the mixup in terminology.

The reason why I would like to get the name of the variable holding reference to the object is that my new myObj would create a new clickable DIV on the page that would need to call a function myObj.someFunction(). As I insert the new DIV I need to know the name of the variable holding reference to the object. Is there maybe a better way of doing this?

Answer 1

Shog9 is right that this doesn’t make all that much sense to ask, since an object could be referred to by multiple variables. If you don’t really care about that, and all you want is to find the name of one of the global variables that refers to that object, you could do the following hack:

function myClass() { 
  this.myName = function () { 
    // search through the global object for a name that resolves to this object
    for (var name in this.global) 
      if (this.global[name] == this) 
        return name 
  } 
}
// store the global object, which can be referred to as this at the top level, in a
// property on our prototype, so we can refer to it in our object's methods
myClass.prototype.global = this
// create a global variable referring to an object
var myVar = new myClass()
myVar.myName() // returns "myVar"

Note that this is an ugly hack, and should not be used in production code. If there is more than one variable referring to an object, you can’t tell which one you’ll get. It will only search the global variables, so it won’t work if a variable is local to a function. In general, if you need to name something, you should pass the name in to the constructor when you create it.

edit: To respond to your clarification, if you need to be able to refer to something from an event handler, you shouldn’t be referring to it by name, but instead add a function that refers to the object directly. Here’s a quick example that I whipped up that shows something similar, I think, to what you’re trying to do:

function myConstructor () {
  this.count = 0
  this.clickme = function () {
    this.count += 1
    alert(this.count)
  }

  var newDiv = document.createElement("div")
  var contents = document.createTextNode("Click me!")

  // This is the crucial part. We don't construct an onclick handler by creating a
  // string, but instead we pass in a function that does what we want. In order to
  // refer to the object, we can't use this directly (since that will refer to the 
  // div when running event handler), but we create an anonymous function with an 
  // argument and pass this in as that argument.
  newDiv.onclick = (function (obj) { 
    return function () {
      obj.clickme()
    }
  })(this)

  newDiv.appendChild(contents)
  document.getElementById("frobnozzle").appendChild(newDiv)

}
window.onload = function () {
  var myVar = new myConstructor()
}