Check if jquery metadata exists?

Question

Couldn't seem to find any info about this googling. Hope that doesn't mean because you can't do it. I'm trying to check if metadata exists on an element. So if I have an element like <a href="#" class="myclass {myid:2,text:bla}">, with my click function I would use $(this).hasClass('myid') or $(this).hasClass({'myid'}). Is it possible to do this?

Also can you add metadata dynamically? If I try $(this).addClass({some:data}), it adds it onto the class, but I can't read it with metadata().

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, the metadata extracted by that plugin is read-only, and it also caches the object it constructs so that it doesn't have to re-parse attribute values and such. If you want a read-write solution, it wouldn't be too hard to write a little function that would take the metadata extracted, and add it to the standard jQuery data store. That, then, can be modified at will. (Actually, I'd be sort of surprised if someone hadn't already written such a plugin.)

Answer 2

Sounds like you want to use jQuery.data(name, [value]);

You can store and retrieve data on any element using it like this.

//store values on the element
$('#someID').data('secret','My voice is my password, verify me.');
$('#someID').data('age',33);
$('#someID').data('name','Jasper');
$('#someID').data('occupation','Toy maker');
//retrieve values from the element
alert(
  'Hi my name is ' + $('#someID').data('name') +
  ' i\'m ' + $('#someID').data('age') +
  ' i\'m a ' + $('#someID').data('occupation') +
  ' oh, and ' + $('#someID').data('secret')
);