Skuunk Works

One issue that has come up in using Unobtrusive JavaScript is how do you assign instance specific data to the element. For example, in the old days (pre UJ) you could iterate over a bunch of objects (each with it's own ID) and hard code the ID into the on{Event} attribute i.e. <% for item in items %> <div onclick="someFunction(<%= item.id %>)">Click here to select item</div> <% end %> But in UJ, on{Event} attributes are no longer considered good practice. If only there was a way we could somehow encode the id with the HTML like we could in Flex (Flex supports dynamic attributes on objects). You can assign a dynamic attribute using JavaScript, but putting a script tag into the loop seems very inelegant and against UJ principles. The other way would be to render all the objects in JavaScript first and then re-render them in HTML. This does seem rather wasteful in terms of processing however and full of index dependencies when you want to merge ...