I have been out of the jQuery loop recently, and have little exposure with
the new data functions in jQuery.
My situation is, I am refactoring an application (using jQuery, of course)
which currently makes heavy use of what I can only describe as pseudo-forms;
essentially, a page might contain many 'forms', although form tags are
rarely used. Instead, the current JS form methods build a query string that
is sent via XHR as a GET request. This is partly due to the fact that we use
many HTML elements that normally aren't form elements (div's, p's, etc, for
various reasons not under my control that I won't go into here), but also
because the form elements are not physically close in the HTML structure and
so grouping becomes a problem.
A basic [mock] scenario: a login 'form', with user/password elements and a
'submit' button. When submit is clicked, it gets the text() of the user and
password elements, contructs a query string from them, and then passes this
to an XHR call.
I am seeking thoughts as to whether -- and if so, how -- the jQuery data
functionality could aid me. I do not need to store any "extra" information
in the elements (expandos are not the issue here), so I'm not sure if the
data functionality would aid me or not.
Is there some paradigm whereby I can group non-form elements together, so
that I can easily convert the items into a GET (or POST at times), and on
the return trip, easily update said related items? I know that I could
inject CSS classes for each specific form elements, so that I could use
$('.form1') to interact with all the elements of "form1", but this method
seems suboptimal. What I was thinking, is created a middle tier that would
exist as the data model for the form, and would contain basic methods for
submitting/updating/etc. the form. This middle tier would the glue that
would tie the data model to the 'form' elements, with the actual HTML
elements doing nothing other than displaying what the model dictates, with
the model being the de facto source of truth in relation to the data.
Is there anything like this already? If not, do you think that the data
functionality be a good or bad fit for me? Am I taking the complete wrong
approach?
Thanks in advance,
ken
