It’s important to notice some points, first you MUST write an “header” using the comment syntax “/* */” into which you MUST declare at least 2 parameter: the “Menu” path (you can nest several menu items by writing several “>”) and the “DOM” package (which allows you to access specific objects like “editors“). You can write several js functions, but you must provide a main() function, which is called automatically by Eclipse once you launch your script, otherwise you can call the main function as you like but you must then provide the “OnLoad” param in the header, specifying which function will be called.
To define a shortcut you can use the “Key” parameter and define your own keys combination by choosing among the four modifiers: M1, M2, M3, M4, that are a platform-independent way of representing keys (these stand for ALT, COMMAND, CTRL, and SHIFT). The strange (at least to me) parameter “Kudos” is used to declare the author of the monkey script.
To test my little script or create your own, you have simply to create a new project into Eclipse by calling it as you like (ie: “custom-extensions”), then create a “scripts” folder into which you will save your .js files… that’s all, try yourself and enjoy :)

This is how it looks:

eclipse monkey script menu

ps: I’m going to explore the Monkey Script API in order to write more complex and useful extensions :P

I have to get 4 tags (t1, t2, t3, t4 with t1 and t4 containing their child nodes).
My regex knowledge is unfortunately very basic, so I googled for a ready to use regex, but none satisfied my need… all the examples I found didn’t handle properly nested tags… so, after some hours of testing I realized my own regex (my first real one), the result is the following:

In my case I’m using that pattern in Javascript, but I think it can be used with any language, because it doesn’t make use of advanced features like “atomic grouping” and these kind of “black magics”. To match the desired tag you can use it by replacing “onetag” with the tag you are looking for (even a tag with a namespace like “<foo:mytag>”).

EDIT:

The pattern above will work only if applied to a single line string (ie: var myString = “<onetag id=’t1′>…”), if you use that pattern on a “complex string” (a string containing spaces and new lines) it won’t works properly. Fortunately you can remove “bad characters” before by using a simple replace:

\s(?!\w) will match any space and new line not followed by an alphanumeric characters (in this way spaces between tag attributes won’t be removed)

EDIT 2:

The pattern /<(onetag)[^<>]*>(<\1[^<>]*><\/\1>)*<\/\1>/gi won’t works properly in presence of several type of nested tags, ie:

The updated pattern is the following:

I hope this will works without further modifications :P

1. The iframe should has an ID assigned:

2. the page loaded into the iframe should contains all the html into an “easy retrievable” container (a div with an ID is perfect!):

3. on the iframe’s page “onload” event, a function will be executed to adjust its height:

• Understand the difference and behavior of String, Number, Array, Date and so on
• Have a deep understanding of what DOM is and how it works (you should at least know these methods: getElementbyId(), getElementsByTagName(), createElement(), appendChild(), removeChild() and innerHTML property)
• Know what objects and constructors are and how they behave
• Know what a function is and how to create one
• Know events, event listeners and event handlers
• Understand loops

Too much stuff to learn? It’s the minimum to know, there are then prototyping, JSON, closures, XMLHttpRequest and so on…
Javascript is a programming language (not a tool for designers), don’t believe that a call to $.doMagic() will resolve your problems, you have to understand what is behind that doMagic() (at least the foundations) in order to realize concrete stuff… otherwise you will only write “magic spaghetti code”!

In jQuery my ajax call looks is the following:

The code above executes a synchronous (async: false) ajax call and returns an XML document object, inside “success” function’s body I pass all my desired parameters to my class constructor, in this way:

getConfig() is an utility function which, by using standard DOM functions (like getElementsByTagName()), reads and returns the required node value. Once the parameters are well defined, inside my class the parametric methods will work fine, and my colleagues won’t have to dig into my code in future to change a desired value, they only will need to open the xml file and quickly change an xml node value. The methods inside the class are so defined in this way:

My only doubt was “how much time it will takes to read and process an xml file and its several nodes?”… and the good answer was: only 0.05 seconds!! I’m very satisfied of my code implementation :)

1. Realize a Java/Actionscript-like class
2. Provide a constructor for the class
3. Implementing public method
4. Implementing private method
5. Ensure encapsulation (class properties can’t be changed by assigning a value to the relative instance’s property)

Honestly, I don’t know if this approach has some weakness point nor if is been already adopted by someone, but I’m pretty satisfied with it and I want to share the technique behind.

My Javascript classes looks like this:

In this way when I will initialize an instance of “MyClass” (var mc = new MyClass()), the constructor will be automatically called and “mc” will have access only to setProperty1() and getProperty1() methods, because they have a “this” scope and not a “var” declaration, other stuff with “var” are so obscured to the instance. Anyway nothing can’t prevent the user to set property directly to the instance (mc._propertyName1 = value), but in that way the user is not setting the class property, rather is defining a new property on the instance, my desired property is safely encapsulated in the class and if the user wants to change its value he must use the provided setter method. For that concerning to the constructor (var MyClass), it would seems a bit “stupid” because the function “MyClass” is a constructor its self, anyway i find that this help me to maintain my js class in order and more readable.

Safety of encapsulation can be tested in this way:

The alert will show “assignment”, mc._propertyName1 = “direct value assignment” hasn’t modified the class property!
Of course if we alert “mc._propertyName1″ we will get “direct value assignment”, but that’s another story… if we use properly getter/setter methods we can ensure a working encapsulation.

Example:

var myString = "000123";
alert(parseInt(myString));

The code above will alert 83 instead of 123 (because the default base guessed by Javascript isn’t 10 like in Actionscript), to get 123 the code must be:

var myString = "000123";
alert(parseInt(myString, 10));

myLabel.getAttribute("for");

(where “myLabel” is a reference to a <label> node)
The function always returns NULL, even if the “for” attribute is manually specified into HTML code, ie:

<label for="my_field_id">my label</label>

Fortunately, after a brief search on Google, I’ve found a post on quirksmode.org, which contains a comment by Tino Zijdel, that show an easy and crossbrowser solution to get the “for” attribute (that can be used both to set a value or to get it):

myLabel.htmlFor

Thank you Tino!

In my search I’d even discovered that on Internet Explorer getAttribute() is different from other browsers, because it offers an extra argument called “iFlags” that is a number that can be 0, 1 or 2 (genial!) and means (I’m reporting the official microsoft documentation):

0 -> Default. Performs a property search that is not case-sensitive, and returns an interpolated value if the property is found
1 -> Performs a case-sensitive property search. To find a match, the uppercase and lowercase letters in AttributeName must exactly match those in the attribute name. If the iFlags parameter for getAttribute is set to 1 and this option is set to 0 (default), the specified property name might not be found.
2 -> Returns the value exactly as it was set in script or in the source document

It would be a better world without Internet Explorer!