Using jQuery.data to store a list of items

Question

I'm working on a page where I need to associate a list of objects with a row of a table, and I'm using jQuery.

jQuery.data seems to just associate a piece of data with a key, whereas I need more like

id=4,setting=2
id=3,setting=1
...

I don't know how long the list could be, and it could be empty.

Is there a sensible way of doing this?

Answer 1

You can store anything as jQuery data, so you could do this:

var myData = [ { id: 4, setting: 2 }, [ id:3, setting:1 ] };

$("#myitem").data("mydata", myData);

If you want to select something by id, you could do this:

var myData = {};

myData[4] = 2;
myData[3] = 1;

$("#myitem").data("mydata", myData);

Then you can access your settings like this:

var value = $("#myitem").data("mydata")[3]; // returns 1

Answer 2

I haven't got a great amount of time to try it now, but instead of storing a simple string against the key, why not store an object against it?

To paraphrase the jquery docs...

$("div").data("blah", {id: 4,setting: 2});
var myBlah = $("div").data("blah");
var id = myBlah["id"];
var setting = myBlah["setting"];

Let me know how you get on.