Skip to the content...

Welcome to the David Walsh Blog. I'm a MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, CSS, and PHP Web Developer located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Please contact me if I can make your experience on my website better.

MooTools Tip: Class.toElement

10 Responses »

Many of you may not know of a feature that's baked into MooTools' Class internals: Class.toElement. Class.toElement allows you to pass the $ (or document.id) method an instance of your class and the instance will be treated as an element.

The MooTools Class.toElement Usage

/* baking into the class */
var myClass = new Class({
	initialize: function(container,options) {
		this.container = $(container);
	},
	// .. lots more methods //
	toElement: function() {
		return this.container;
	}
});

/* usage */
var mc = new MyClass('wrapper');
$(mc).fade('out'); //fades the container out

This isn't a groundbreaking piece of code but it's just another example of the flexibility that MooTools affords its developers. Happy coding!

Discussion

  1. January 11, 2010 @ 10:53 am

    Haven’t noticed this wonderful tiny yet so useful method before. Thanks for bringing this up :)

  2. jeremy
    January 11, 2010 @ 1:11 pm

    i was actually just reading about this today.

    it seems often times the method is used to create the element that gets returned as well, in which case its important to make sure the method doesn’t re-define the element it returns.

    toElement: function() {
    if (this.element) return this element;
    return this.element = new Element(…);
    }

  3. January 11, 2010 @ 7:16 pm

    Hey, that’s a useful thing! Didn’t know this before, THX for sharing!

Be Heard!

Share your thoughts with fellow developers of all skill levels! I want to hear from you!

Name*:
Email*:
Website:  
Wrap your code with <code> tags, f00!