Reference to current object in constructor

Question

I'm trying to define a class that, in its constructor, instantiates other objects and passes them a reference to itself:

var Child = function(m) {
  var mother = m;

  return {
    mother: mother
  }
}

var Mother = function() {
  var children = makeChildren();

  return {
    children: children
  }

  function makeChildren() {
    var children = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
      var c = new Child(this);      // <--- 'this' is an empty object here
      children.push(c)
    }
    return children;
  }
}

This doesn't work, and the Child instances end up with an empty object in their mother property. What is the proper way to do this?

Answer 1

Javascript's this is not lexical. This means that makeChildren gets its own this instead of getting the Mother's this you want.

Set a normal variable to this and use it instead.

var that = this;
function makeChildren(){
     blabla = that;
}

---

I don't think doing this is just enough though. By returning an object from the constructor you ignore the this. Set things into it:

this.children = children;

instead of returning a new object.

Answer 2

You could try passing a reference to the mother object when you call makeChildren() from within the mother object, something like this maybe:

var Mother = function() {
   var children = makeChildren(this);
}

The makeChildren() function can then accept as an argument the reference, which you can use:

function makeChildren(ref)
var c = new Child(ref);

No idea whether or not that will work, but it might be worth a try.