JQuery Dynamically Create Table/tr/td Or Etc And Append Attributes

Question

In an example I am having this structure (small example):

Test1

Solution 1:

Here's a simplified example:

  $(function() {
    var tbl = $('<table></table>').attr({ id: "bob" });
    var row = $('<tr></tr>').attr({ class: ["class1", "class2", "class3"].join(' ') }).appendTo(tbl);
    $('<td></td>').text("text1").appendTo(row);
    $('<td></td>').text("Test22").prepend($('<a></a>').attr({ href: "#" }).text("LINK")).appendTo(row);        
    tbl.appendTo($(".somePlaceInHtml"));        
  });

Wrap the row portion in a loop, replace with variables and it's at least easier to maintain/read in my opinion, but I'm used to jQuery, so your mileage may vary, just an option.

A side note, since this is using .text() everywhere, it helps prevents cross-site scripting attacks within your output as well.

Solution 2:

Can you make a "template" out of your string? If yes, then store it in a "constant" variable (e.g. defined in global scope), containing placeholders for actual variables, like {0}, {1} etc, as you would use it in C#'s string.format() method.

So, you would have code like this:

var rowTemplate = "<tr><td>{0}</td><td>SomePredefinedText {1}</td></tr>";
var alternateRowTemplate = "<tr><td class='a'>{0}</td><td>SomewhatDifferent {1}</td></tr>";
 ...... somewhere deep in your code
 $("#someElement").append(
        rowTemplate.format("myvalue1", "myvalue2")
       ).append(
        alternateRowTemplate.format("myvalue3", "myvalue4")
       );

You would then use the string.format implementation as per this answer: Equivalent of String.format in jQuery

Solution 3:

You could create a StringBuilder, much like the one in C#. Here's a snippet took from Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC:

$.stringBuilder = function() {
    this.buffer = [];
};

$.stringBuilder.prototype = {

    cat: function(what) {
        this.buffer.push(what);
        return this;
    },

    string: function() {
        return this.buffer.join('');
    }
};

This way, you can have the following code:

var html = new $.stringBuilder();
for (var i in data)
    html.cat("<tr><td>").cat(i).cat("</td><td></tr>");

$('#element').append(html.string());

The benefit of this approach is that you'll have fast concatenation (array joins perform better under IE6), and you could extend the object with other useful function (say, catIf that takes a boolean expression, or rep that repeats a given string several times).

Solution 4:

Or you could instead of concatenating strings together so make use of the array.join function.

    for(var i=0;i<arr.length;i++)
    {
      arr[i] = "<tr>" + sth + "</tr>";       
    }

node.innerHTML = arr.join('');

Solution 5:

window.onload = function(){
    var btn = document.createElement("button");
    btn.setAttribute("id", "submit_bttn");
    btn.style.width = 125 + "px";
    btn.style.height = 50 + "px";
    btn.innerHTML = "Submit";
    document.body.appendChild(btn);

    var x = document.getElementById("submit_bttn");
    x.onclick = function(){
        alert("hi");
    }
}

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