prototype1.5 first experience_prototype

I have never had time to look at the prototype. Now it’s good. It has been updated to 1.5 pre1. Haha, I have to learn the powerful functions. This is another shortcut to improve my JS ability.

1. What is Prototype?
Maybe you haven’t used it yet, prototype.js is a JavaScript package written by Sam Stephenson. This wonderfully conceived, well-written, standards-compliant piece of code will shoulder the burden of creating thick-client, highly interactive web applications. Easily add Web 2.0 features.

If you have experienced this package recently, you will most likely find that documentation is not one of its strong points. Like all developers before me, I just dived into the prototype.js source code and experimented with every piece of it. I thought it would be nice to take notes as I studied him and share them with others.

I have also provided an unofficial reference for this package's objects, classes, methods and extensions.

2. Universal methods
This package contains many predefined objects and universal methods. The obvious purpose of writing these methods is to save you a lot of repetitive coding and idioms.

Starting from Prototype 1.5.x version, you can more conveniently operate DOM objects as follows:

var ele = $("myelement");
ele. hide(); //Hide DOM object compared to the previous version var ele = $("myelement");
Element.hide(ele); //Hide DOM object

What are the benefits of such a change Woolen cloth? I think firstly, it is more object-oriented, and secondly, it will facilitate future code prompts in the IDE.
2.1. Use the $() method
The $() method is a convenient shorthand for the document.getElementById() method that is used too frequently in DOM, just like this DOM method, This method returns the element with the id passed in as the parameter.

This is better than the method in DOM. You can pass multiple ids as parameters and $() returns an Array object with all required elements. The following example will describe this to you.

<script> <br> function test1() <br> { <br> var d = $('myp'); <br> alert(d.innerHTML); <br> } <br><br> function test2() <br> { <br> var ps = $('myp','myOtherp'); <br> for(i=0; i<ps.length; i ) <br> { <br> alert(ps[i].innerHTML); <br> } <br> } <br></script>


< BODY>
                                                                ;
                                                                            ;

 






Another benefit of this method is that you can pass in the id string or the element object itself, which makes it very useful when creating methods that can pass in any formal parameters. .


2.2. Using the $F() method

The $F() method is another very popular shorthand. It can return the value of any input form control, such as a text box or drop-down box. This method can pass in the id of the element or the element itself.

<script> <br> function test3() <br> { <br> alert( $F('userName') ); <br> } <br></script>

2.3. Use Try.these() method
Try.these() method makes it possible to implement when you want to call different methods until one of them succeeds Normally, this requirement becomes very easy. It takes a series of methods as parameters and executes these methods one by one in order until one of them is successfully executed, and returns the return value of the successfully executed method.

In the example below, xmlNode.text works fine in some browsers, but xmlNode.textContent works fine in others. Using the Try.these() method we can get the return value of the method that works normally.

<script> <br>function getXmlNodeValue(xmlNode){ <br> return Try.these( <br> function() {return xmlNode.text;}, <br> function() {return xmlNode .textContent;) <br>     ); <br>} <br></script> Generic methods are great, but let's face it, they're not the most advanced kind of thing. Are they? You've probably written these methods yourself or even have similar functionality in your scripts. But these methods are just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm pretty sure the reason you're interested in prototype.js is probably due to its AJAX capabilities. So let's explain how this package makes it easier when you need to complete AJAX logic.

The Ajax object is a predefined object created by this package in order to encapsulate and simplify the tricky code involved in writing AJAX functionality. This object contains a series of classes that encapsulate AJAX logic. Let’s take a look at some of them.
3.1. Using the Ajax.Request class

If you don't use any helper packages, you're probably writing a whole lot of code to create the XMLHttpRequest object and track it asynchronously process, then parse out the response and process it. You'll be lucky when you don't need to support more than one type of browser.

To support AJAX function. This package defines the Ajax.Request class.

Suppose you have an application that can communicate with the server through the url http://www.php.cn/. It returns an XML response like below.


                                                                                                                                                     year-month>
                                                                                🎜>                                                                                                                                             id>
                                                                               

It is very simple to use the Ajax.Request object to communicate with the server and get this XML. The example below demonstrates how it is done.

<script> <br> function searchSales() <br> { <br> var empID = $F('lstEmployees'); <br> var y = $F('lstYears'); <br> var url = 'http://yoursever/app/get_sales'; <br> var pars = 'empID=' empID '&year=' y; <br> var myAjax = new Ajax.Request( <br>   url, <br>                                                                                                                                                                    ponse(originalRequest) <br> { <br> // put returned XML in the textarea <br> $('result').value = originalRequest.responseText; <br> } <br></script>

Buchanan, Steven Callahan, Laura Davolio, Nancy
1996 1997 < ;option value="1998">1998

Did you see the second object passed into the Ajax.Request constructor? Parameters {method: 'get', parameters: pars, onComplete: showResponse} represent the actual writing of an anonymous object. He means that the object you passed in has an attribute named method with a value of 'get', another attribute named parameters that contains the query string of the HTTP request, and an onComplete attribute/method that contains the function showResponse.

There are some other properties that can be defined and set in this object, such as asynchronous, which can be true or false to determine whether the AJAX call to the server is asynchronous (the default value is true).

This parameter defines the options for the AJAX call. In our example, when requesting that url via the HTTP GET command as the first parameter, passing in the query string contained in the variable pars, the Ajax.Request object will call the showResponse method when it has finished receiving the response.

As you may know, XMLHttpRequest will report progress during the HTTP request. This progress is described as four different stages: Loading, Loaded, Interactive, or Complete. You can make the Ajax.Request object call custom methods at any stage, Complete is the most commonly used one. To call a custom method, simply provide a custom method object in the onXXXXX attribute/method in the option parameter of the request. Like onComplete in our example. The method you pass in will be called with one parameter, which is the XMLHttpRequest object itself. You will use this object to get the returned data and perhaps check the status attribute containing the HTTP result code in this call.

There are two other useful options for processing the results. We can pass a method in the onSuccess option and call it when AJAX is executed without error. On the contrary, we can also pass a method in the onFailure option and call it when an error occurs on the server side. Just like the methods passed in the onXXXXX option, these two also pass in an XMLHttpRequest object with an AJAX request when called.

Our example doesn’t process the XML response in any interesting way, we just put the XML into a text field. A typical application for this response might be to find the desired information in it and then update some elements in the page, or maybe even do some XSLT transformations to produce some HTML in the page.

3.2. Use the Ajax.Updater class
If the information returned by the other end of your server is already HTML, then using the Ajax.Updater class in this package will allow you to life becomes easier. With it you just need to provide which element needs to be filled with the HTML returned by the AJAX request. The example is clearer than what I wrote.

<script> <br> function getHTML() <br> { <br> var url = 'http://yourserver/app/getSomeHTML'; <br> var pars = 'someParameter=ABC' ; <br><br> var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater('placeholder', url, {method: 'get', parameters: pars}); <br><br> } <br></script>

You can see that this code is more concise than the previous example and does not include the onComplete method, but an element id is passed in the constructor. Let's modify the code slightly to describe how it is possible to handle server segmentation faults on the client side.

We will add more options to specify a way to handle errors. This is done using the onFailure option.

We also specify a placeholder that will only be filled after a successful request. To accomplish this we changed the first parameter from a simple element id to an object with two properties, success (used when everything is OK) and failure (used when something goes wrong) In the following example, the failure attribute is not used, but only the reportError method is used at onFailure.

<script> <br> function getHTML() <br> { <br> var url = 'http://yourserver/app/getSomeHTML'; <br> var pars = 'someParameter=ABC'; <br> var myAjax = new Ajax.Updater( <br> {success: 'placeholder'}, <br> url, <br> {method : 'get', parameters: pars, onFailure: reportError}); <br><br> } <br><br> function reportError(request) <br> { <br> alert('Sorry. There was an error.'); <br> } <br></script>
< input type=button value=GetHtml onclick="getHTML()">

If your server The logic is to return JavaScript code instead of simple HTML markup, and the Ajax.Updater object can execute that JavaScript code. To make this object treat responses as JavaScript, you simply add the evalScripts: true attribute to the last parameter of the object's constructor.