2 things I like in prototype 1.6.1

March 31st, 2009 by Andrea Franz

The stable version of prototype is 1.6.0.3. I just fiddled around with the edge version (1.6.1_rc2) and I found 2 new features I really like. The first one is the Element#clone method. At last I can easily clone an element, or make a deep clone of it passing true as first argument:

<div id="genres">
  <div class="genre">
    <select name="genre[]">
      <option>Your favorite genre...</option>
      <option>Death Metal</option>
      <option>Black Metal</option>
      <option>Speed Metal</option>
    </select>
  </div>
</div>
<a id="add-genre" href="#">Add</a>

document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {
  $("add-genre").observe("click", function(event) {
    event.stop();
    var genres = $("genres"); 
    genres.insert(genres.down(".genre").clone(true));
  });
});

Just click the Add link to add a new the select tag.

Another cool new feature is the Element Storage. You can store any kind of data inside a element, and retrieve it when you need it.

Here an example:

<div id="items">
  <div class="item" id="item-1">
    <h1>Item 1</h1>
    <a href="#" class="save">Save</a>
  </div>
  <div class="item" id="item-2">
    <h1>Item 2</h1>
    <a href="#" class="save">Save</a>
  </div>
</div>

document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {
  var item = $("item-1");
  var data = item.retrieve("data", {});
  data.url = "http://cowboys.from.hell/items/1";			
 
  $("items").select("a.save").invoke("observe", "click", function(event) {
    alert(event.target.up(".item").retrieve("data").url);
  });
});