jQuery bind events with Rails/Coffeescript?

Question

So in app/assets/javascript/faye.js.coffee.erb I have the following:

$('#room_tag').bind('blur', () ->
   alert('Hey!')
)

All the other code in it such as: sendmessage('room', 'message') work just fine. And I can copy and paste the code generated from the block above and paste it into Chrome it works fine. I assume this is because, is it rails or coffeescript?, either way one of them, wraps the entire file in:

(function() {
  // your generated code here
}).call(this);

Also would there happen to be a way for me to access methods that are defined within there? Is it possible to define a method in there without assigning it to a variable?

Answer 1

1) Most likely your .bind call is executing too soon, before the document is ready and thus it doesn't do anything. Wrap it in a call to $(document).ready like this

    $(document).ready ->
      $('#room_tag').bind 'blur', ->
        alert 'Hey!'

And there's actually a cute shortcut for this since jQuery's default $ function is an alias for $(document).ready, you can just do:

$ ->
  $('#room_tag').bind 'blur', ->
    alert 'Hey!'

2) It is coffeescript that wraps everything in a self-executing function definition.

3) If you want to make a global function in coffeescript, explicitly assign it as a property of the global window object

    window.myFunc = (arg1) ->
      alert arg1

2) & 3) are clearly explained in the CoffeeScript docs