storing hidden ids and then submitting them with ajax, best practices?

Question

I have a list of messages with element ids as "message"+id ( message1, message2 etc) when user makes ajax request from any particular message i want to access only the id. should i strip the id from the message id in jquery before submitting or do it on the server side? Or is there a simpler way to represent the id on the webpage for each message?

Answer 1

You can attach the message ID as an attribute to the DOM element itself. In mootools it is

Elm.set('messageId',12);//12 is an arbitrary message id I chose for this example.
//get it
alert(Elm.get('messageId'));

I am 100% sure in JQuery there is something very similar. But, striping the id itself, using JS, from a string with a pre-known format ain't that hard.

Answer 2

The user has to click something, right? If it's a link, I'd put the id somewhere in the onclick function call; if it's a button, same deal with a hidden form input. That you're doing this all with jQuery makes it all easier, but doesn't particularly matter.

Answer 3

Depending on how the rest of your page works you could wrap each element in a form tag and use a hidden field for the id. Potentially, doing this in conjunction with the jquery forms plugin (http://www.malsup.com/jquery/form/) could save you some development effort overall.

Adding attributes to the dom will also work of course as long as you aren't concerned about putting non-compliant attributes in there.

In any case, I'd definitely recommend sending an id value to the server in your ajax request rather than stripping the value out of a string on the server. This is cleaner and better from a separation of concerns perspective.