MooTools Tip: Class.toElement

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Multiple File Upload Input

    More often than not, I find myself wanting to upload more than one file at a time.  Having to use multiple "file" INPUT elements is annoying, slow, and inefficient.  And if I hate them, I can't imagine how annoyed my users would be.  Luckily Safari, Chrome...

Discussion

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

  2. jeremy

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

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!