How to expand an onchange event with JavaScript

Question

This is a question I ran into about expanding on an element's JavaScript onchange event. I have several select elements that conditionally will have one onchange event attached to each of them (when they change to specific values, it hides/unhides certain elements). I want to conditionally add or append to another onchange event so they set a global variable if they do change without modifying or disabling the previous function already attached to them. Is there a way to "append" an additional function or add more functionality onto the already existing one?

Here is what I believe an example would be like:

<select id="selectbox1">
    <option>...</option>
    <option>...</option>
</select>

if (<certain conditions>) {
    document.getElementById("selectbox1").onchange = function () { 
        //hides elements to reduce clutter on a web form ...
    }
}
....
if (<other conditions>) {
    document.getElementById("selectbox1").onchange = function2 () {
        //set global variable to false
    }
}

Alternatively I'd like to simply add the 1-liner "set global variable to false" to the original function.

Answer 1

You can cheat by simply having a composite function that calls the other functions.

document.getElementById("selectbox1").onchange = function() {
    function1();
    function2();
}

You can also use the observer pattern, described in the book Pro JavaScript Design Patterns. I have an example of its use in an article (here).

//– publisher class — 
function Publisher() { 
    this.subscribers = []; 
};

Publisher.prototype.deliver = function(data) { 
    this.subscribers.forEach(function(fn) { fn(data); }); 
};

//– subscribe method to all existing objects 
Function.prototype.subscribe = function(publisher) { 
    var that = this; 
    var alreadyExists = publisher.subscribers.some(function(el) { 
        if (el === that) { 
            return; 
        } 
    });

    if (!alreadyExists) { 
        publisher.subscribers.push(this); 
    } 
    return this; 
};