JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

jQuery Getters and Setters

Some of the simplest, and most common, operations on jQuery objects are those that get or set the value of HTML attributes, CSS styles, element content, or element geometry. This section describes those methods. First, however, it is worth making some generalizations about getter and setter methods in jQuery:

• Rather than defining a pair of methods, jQuery uses a single method as both getter and setter. If you pass a new value to the method, it sets that value; if you don’t specify a value, it returns the current value.

• When used as setters, these methods set values on every element in the jQuery object, and then return the jQuery object to allow method chaining.

• When used as getters, these methods query only the first element of the set of elements and return a single value. (Use map() if you want to query all elements.) Since getters do not return the jQuery object they are invoked on, they can only appear at the end of a method chain.

• When used as setters, these methods often accept object arguments. In this case, each property of the object specifies a name and a value to be set.

• When used as setters, these methods often accept functions as values. In this case, the function is invoked to compute the value to be set. The element that the value is being computed for is the this value, the element index is passed as the first argument to the function, and the current value is passed as the second argument.

Keep these generalizations about getters and setters ...