Reapply JS Prototype functions after deserialization

Question

Given the following code:

function Person(firstName, lastName) {
    this.FirstName = firstName;
    this.LastName = lastName;
}

Person.prototype.showFullName = function() {
    return this.FirstName + " " + this.LastName;
};

var person = new Person("xx", "xxxx");
var jsonString = JSON.stringify(person);

var thePerson = JSON.parse(jsonString);

My goal here would be to be able to call "showFullName" on thePerson. While I understand that JS does not really have objects, it must have some way of being able to say something should be treated a certain way, like casting thePerson to a Person.

Answer 1

To my knowledge the best way to do this is to construct a vanilla object first and then plop the data onto it using something like jQuery's extend, ie.

var thePerson = new Person(); // and make sure the constructor gracefully handles no arguments
jQuery.extend(thePerson, JSON.parse(stringData));

As mentioned below, you don't need to use extend if you're only creating a shallow copy, which you are here. You can just loop through the properties of the parsed data and copy them onto your target object.