Combine two collections of elements with mobify.js

Question

everyone.

I've just started using the mobifyjs toolkit and I've ran into a problem of combining two collections of elements into one. On a page I'm trying to mobify there are two sets of links: with text and images. The HTML looks like the following:

<!-- links with text -->
<div id="products">
    <a href="Product1">Product 1</a>
    <a href="Product2">Product 2</a>
</div>
...
<!-- somewhere else on the page -->
<div id="productImages">
    <a href="Product1"><img src="Product1.png /></a>
    <a href="Product2"><img src="Product2.png /></a>
</div>

It needs to turn into the following:

<div class="items">
    <div class="item">
        <div class="img">
            <a href="Product1"><img src="Product1.png /></a>
        </div>
        <div class="title">
            <a href="Product1">Product 1</a>
        </div>      
    </div>
    <div class="item">
        <div class="img">
            <a href="Product2"><img src="Product2.png /></a>
        </div>
        <div class="title">
            <a href="Product2">Product 2</a>
        </div>      
    </div>
</div>

My current solution is to use map function, so in the mobify.konf I have something like the following:

'content': function(context) {
    return context.choose(
        {{
            'templateName': 'products',
            'products': function(){
                return $('#productImages a').map(function() {
                    var href = $(this).attr('href') || '';

                    var div = $('<div class="item"><div class="img"></div><div class="title"></div></div>');
                    div.find('.img').append($(this).clone());
                    div.find('.title').append($('#products a[href="' + href + '"]').clone());

                    return div;
                });
            }
        })
}

And the template is:

<div class="items">
    {#content.products}
        {.}
    {/content.products}
</div>

This code does work but the approach itself is pretty ugly since I have to move a piece of markup code from the tmpl file into mobify.konf. Can anyone suggest a better solution?

Answer 1

The best way to do this sort of thing is to collect the relevant properties for your items (e.g. the product name, the image url and the link href) into a data structure in javascript, and then create a template for your new html structure in the .tmpl file. Something like

'products': function() {
    var products = [], 
        $productLinks = $('#products a'), 
        $productImages = $('#productImages img')
        len = $productNames.legnth;
    for(var i = 0; i<len; i++) {
        var $link = $productLinks.eq(i);
        var $img = $productImages.eq(i);
        products.push({name: $link.text(), href: $link.attr('href'), imgSrc: $img.attr('src')});
    }
    return products;

}

and then template it by iterating over the array items and inserting them into relevant places in the markup:

<div class="items">
{#content.products}
    <div class="item">
        <div class="img"><img src="{.imgSrc}" /></div>
        <div class="title"><a href="{.href}">{.name}</a></div>
    </div>
{content.products}
</div>