Question

Say when a checkbox is checked/unchecked, I want specific behavior to occur.

Now if there are multiple points in my code where I set a checkbox as checked/unchecked, I have to run through the same logic ever time.

What is a way I can encapsulate the logic that occurs when a checkbox is checked, and just re-use that logic?

Answer 1

My guess is that you’re currently binding click event handlers like this:

$('some-selector').click(function (event)
{
    // do fancy stuff here
});

To encapsulate that logic, you just need to switch from using an anonymous function, to a function that you can reuse, like this:

function handleClicks(event)
{
    // do fancy stuff here
}

$('some-selector').click(handleClicks);
$('some-other-selector').click(handleClicks);

How’s that?

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I might also take a guess at the fact that the logic you’re writing and rewriting is to wire a “check-all” sort of checkbox to a group of checkboxes. I wrote a jQuery plugin recently to handle exactly this sort of thing.

I never got around to uploading it properly to GitHub – here’s the gist of it. Let me know if you’d like to actually use it, and I can explain its usage – it’s pretty darn simple.