Question

Ok, so I have this inside a form

<INPUT type="text" name="inputbox" value="">
<INPUT TYPE="button" NAME="button2" Value="Write" onClick="writeText(this.form)">

and I have the following generated javascript from coffeescript

(function() {
  var writeText;

  writeText = function(form) {
    return form.inputbox.value = "ping";
  };

}).call(this);

I need to know how do I call writeText?

as it is when I click the button nothing happens….if I remove the function(){}.call(this) wrapper it works.

I cannot remove the wrapper. I need to know how to call writeText with the .call(this) in place.

Answer 1

It’s a scoping issue, where Coffeescript wraps everything inside it’s own closure to avoid polluting the global namespace. There are two solutions;

1. Compile using coffeescript’s “–bare” option (which avoid putting the wrapper there in the first place).

2. Bind your coffeescript function to some object that the browser sees when running. Like this:


window.writeText = (form) ->
form.inputbox.value = "ping"


In the second option, your writeText function is bound to the window object in the browser, which is the implicit this object when your script runs in the browser.