Question

Please note that Object.Watch and Object.Observe are both deprecated now (as of Jun 2018).

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I was looking for an easy way to monitor an object or variable for changes, and I found Object.watch(), that’s supported in Mozilla browsers, but not IE. So I started searching around to see if anyone had written some sort of equivalent.

About the only thing I’ve found has been a jQuery plugin, but I’m not sure if that’s the best way to go. I certainly use jQuery in most of my projects, so I’m not worried about the jQuery aspect…

Anyway, the question: Can someone show me a working example of that jQuery plugin? I’m having problems making it work…

Or, does anyone know of any better alternatives that would work cross browser?

Update after answers:

Thanks everyone for the responses! I tried out the code posted here:
http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2009/01/internet-explorer-object-watch.html

But I couldn’t seem to make it work with IE. The code below works fine in Firefox, but does nothing in IE. In Firefox, each time watcher.status is changed, the document.write() in watcher.watch() is called and you can see the output on the page. In IE, that doesn’t happen, but I can see that watcher.status is updating the value, because the last document.write() call shows the correct value (in both IE and FF). But, if the callback function isn’t called, then that’s kind of pointless… 🙂

Am I missing something?

var options = {'status': 'no status'},
watcher = createWatcher(options);

watcher.watch("status", function(prop, oldValue, newValue) {
  document.write("old: " + oldValue + ", new: " + newValue + "<br>");
  return newValue;
});

watcher.status = 'asdf';
watcher.status = '1234';

document.write(watcher.status + "<br>");

Answer 1

(Sorry for the cross-posting, but this answer I gave to a similar question works fine here)

I have created a small object.watch shim for this a while ago. It works in IE8, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc.