Question

Say I have a function that takes an arbitrary number of arguments (the last is callback):

xxx.create ('arg1', 'arg2', ..., 'arg10', callback) {
    ...
}

But it’s ugly. I want to be able to extract the first few parameters and do something like:

var args = ['arg1', 'arg2', ..., 'arg10']
xxx.create (args.explode(), callback) {
    ...
}

Of course I can write a wrapper for xxx.create(), but I want it to be clean.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You’re looking for Function.apply.

var args = ['arg1', 'arg2', ..., 'argN'];
xxx.create.apply(xxx, args.concat(callback)) {
    // ...
}

I used Array.concat so as to not mutate the original args array. If that’s not a problem, either of these will suffice:

var args = ['arg1', 'arg2', ..., 'argN', callback];
xxx.create.apply(xxx, args) {
    // ...
}

// or

var args = ['arg1', 'arg2', ..., 'argN'];
args.push(callback);
xxx.create.apply(xxx, args) {
    // ...
}

---

Now, if you wanted to use a wrapper instead of exposing the Function.apply call:

function create_wrapper() {
    xxx.create(xxx, arguments);
}

// then

create_wrapper('arg1', 'arg2', ..., 'argN', callback);

will do the job.