Question

What is the difference between XSP.getElementById and document.getElementById? In my tests both seem to return the same value (value stored in field). Which one should be preferred while coding for XPages?

Answer 1

edited

XSP.getElementById is the same as dojo.byId which I believe works in wider range of browsers than document.getElementById.

Here is the source for XSP.getElementById:

   /**
    * Convenience function for retrieving an element given its id in a browser independent manner.
    */
    this.getElementById = function x_gbi(elementId){
        return dojo.byId(elementId);
    }

I guess for better future XPage support it might be a good idea to use XSP.getElementById (because they might change it) instead of dojo.byId. I’ve been using dojo.byId because it’s shorter. document.getElementById should never be used in XPages because we have dojo.byId.

update

Starting from Dojo 1.7 the syntax is much more complex:

require(["dojo/dom"], function(dom){
    // fetch a node by id="someNode"
    var node = dom.byId("someNode");
});

Today my colleque pointed out that Dojo 2 will not support the current simple way of calling dojo.byId any more. This means that XSP.getElementById is definitely the way to go and we should start using the new require based syntax whenever we use Dojo with ND9.