Question

What I’d like to do is this : when the user clicks on send, I want the data to be displayed in a <tr/> (with each field nested in its own <td/>).

I already wrote a script that actually does this, but the system is not dynamic yet.

HTML :

<form name="contact" method="post" action="">
    <p>
        <label for="name">Name</label>
        <input type="text" name="name" id="name" />
    </p>
    <p>
        <label for="age">Age</label>
        <input type="text" name="age" id="age" />
    </p>
    <p>
        <label for="mail">Mail</label>
        <input type="text" name="mail" id="mail" />
    </p>
    <p>
        <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Send" />
    </p>
</form>
<table id="results"></table>

JS :

$(function() {
    $("#submit").click(function() {

        var name = $("input#name").val();
        var age = $("input#age").val();
        var mail = $("input#mail").val();

        var dataString = [name, age, mail];
        var n = dataString.length;

        $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: "process.php",
            data: dataString,
            success: function() {
                $('#results').append(
                    $('<tr>')
                        .append($('<td>').append(dataString[0]))
                        .append($('<td>').append(dataString[1]))
                        .append($('<td>').append(dataString[2]))
                );
            }
        });
        return false;
    });
})

As you can see, I grab the fields manually with dataString[x], but how can I make this system dynamic?

I was thinking of using a loop like the following but I can’t seem to make it work :

for(var i = 0; i < n; i++){
    row += "$('<td>').append("+dataString[i]+")";
}

$('#results').append(
    $('<tr>')
        .append(row)
);

Any hint on how to do this? Or would you have a cleaner solution?

Answer 1

This line of code:

row += "$('<td>').append("+dataString[i]+")";

isn’t creating an element and appending data to it, it’s just concatenating the row variable and a string literal (that contains jQuery code).

Why not make row an actual row – rather than a string that contains the contents of a row – then append that in the success callback handler instead:

var row = $('<tr>');
for(var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    row.append($('<td>').html(dataString[i]));
}

Then:

$('#results').append(row);