How to subclass a specific jqueryui widget method ?

Question

Since I updated jQueryUI to 1.8 I found a couple of issues in our implementations and I could fix it myself without waiting for a fix on their end if I could find out how to subclass a specific method of the datepicker widget so I call the parent code and then execute my code.

I was reading on $.widget but I just can't wrap my head around how that is suppose to work.

I tried something like this:

$.widget("ui.datepicker", {
  _showDatepicker: function(input) {
   alert('Yo');
   $.datepicker.prototype._showDatepicker.apply(this,arguments);
   alert('Hey!');
  }
 });

And all sorts of other variations and beging to think I just don't understand the 'extendability' of jQueryUI or it just can't be done.

Anybody knows how I can achieve this ?

Thx

Answer 1

The datepicker in 1.8 doesn't use the widget factory. The other widgets do but the datepicker hasn't been refactored to use the widget factory yet, something that will happen for 1.9.

You can do something like for the datepicker:

var old_showDatepicker = $.datepicker._showDatepicker;
$.datepicker._showDatepicker = function(input){
    console.log('hello');
    old_showDatepicker.apply(this,arguments);
    console.log('goodbye');
}

And this for the slider:

$.widget("my.slider", $.ui.slider, {
    _value: function(input) {
        console.log('Yo');
        $.ui.slider.prototype.value.apply(this,arguments);
        console.log('Hey!');
    }
});