Data Methods
There's often data about an element you want to store with the element. In plain JavaScript, you might do this by adding a property to the DOM element, but you'd have to deal with memory leaks in some browsers. jQuery offers a straightforward way to store data related to an element, and it manages the memory issues for you.
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Any kind of data can be stored on an element. For the purposes of this article, $.fn.data
will be used to store references to other elements.
For example, you may want to establish a relationship between a list item and a <div>
that's inside of it. This relationship could be established every single time the list item is touched, but a better solution would be to establish the relationship once, then store a pointer to the <div>
on the list item using $.fn.data
:
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In addition to passing $.fn.data
a single key-value pair to store data, you can also pass an object containing one or more pairs.