[jQuery] Unobtrusively passing data

[Leo]

I'm building a rails app and I've been trying to keep my html as
unobtrusive as possible and my application.js as general as possible.

Up until now I've been able to build re-usable page components by
creating specific layout structure with the occasional custom
attribute. Now I'm trying to integrate an autocomplete into my pages
and am looking for a clean way to get data to the autocomplete
component.

Here's what I do...

In my view html
  I create the form element for autocomplete with
class='autocompleter'
  With javascript I add the data source to a global array that is
indexed by element id. This lets me pass arrays etc.

In my application.js
  I added the following function called from my ready function.

var autocomplete_data = [];
function load_autocompleters() {
        $(".autocompleted").each(function() {
                $(this).autocomplete(autocomplete_data[this.id], {
                                matchContains: true,
                                minChars: 0
                        });
        });
}

This works just fine, but is there a better way to do this?