Question

Possible Duplicate:
How do you know when to return false from a jQuery function?

We all have some jquery code that looks like this:

$('#MySelector').somefunction(function () {

   // do something

});

Is there a benefit/penalty for including a return statement and should we return true or false? For now, I’d say my code works fine without the return statements but I was wondering what would a return statement do in the context I described.

Thanks for your clarifications.

Answer 1

You’re passing the anonymous function as a parameter to somefunction, so it really depends on what somefunction does with that parameter. What really matters is what somefunction returns. For example, let’s say this is how it’s defined:

$.fn.somefunction = function ( fnParam ) {
  var returnVal = fnParam();

  if (returnVal) {
    // do something
  } else {
    // do something else
  }

  return this;
};

So here we assign the return value of fnParam to a variable and use that variable to determine actions within somefunction. somefunction returns this though, which would be the jQuery object that it was passed (in your example $('#MySelector')). Since you return this, somefunction can chain with other jQuery methods like:

$('#MySelector').somefunction(function(){ // blah })
                .css('background','yellow')
                .appendTo('body')
                .show();