Freelancing Gods 2008

Neat little refactoring trick for the day (as I’ve just recounted to the roro crew)...

I found myself writing several window.onload event listeners in javascript to set focus to the default text inputs on various pages. It’s annoying, and doesn’t feel at all elegant, so to make it a little cleaner, I wrote a single onload listener, which grabbed the last item with the class ‘autofocus’, and set focus to that. So now all I need to do for future pages is give the text input a class of ‘autofocus’.

Javascript code, with prototype:

Event.observe(window, "load", function() {
  var last = $$(".autofocus").last();
  if (last) last.focus();
});

Not so useful if you rarely have default text fields, but for the app I’m working on, there’s a lot of different pages, hence why I’m quite happy with the above solution.