abusing innerHTML

ophillip · July 19th, 2005, 01:04 PM

I am tring to write a function that can handle tasks for mutliple tables. I have a button's onlcick event calling the function and passing the name of the table to the function like so:

<BUTTON ID="LexmarkSelect" onclick=mySelect("Lexmark") style="font-size=8pt">

When I call the function I build a variable to address the button like this:

function mySelect(TableName)
{
var ButtonName = ("SubmitPO." + TableName + "Select")
.....

BUT when I try to use ButtonName with innerHTML it bombs:

(ButtonName).innerHTML=("Select None");

I have tried several variations, including an alert box as troubleshooting, the following alert boxes return 'undefined':

alert(ButtonName.innerHTML);
alert((ButtonName).innerHTML);

Is this idea even close to something that will actually work? Or am I wasting my time?

joefawcett · July 20th, 2005, 02:10 AM

If you have one, and only one, button named "SubmitPOLexmarkSelect" then to access it you need:

Code:

var oButton = document.getElementsByName("SubmitPOLexmarkSelect");

I believe getElementsByName returns a collection if there are more than one elements with that name or just an object if not but it's a long time since I used it. If it fails try:

Code:

var oButton = document.getElementsByName("SubmitPOLexmarkSelect")[0];

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

ophillip · July 20th, 2005, 06:58 AM

The problem is that I have more than one button on the page. That is why I was trying to make the code a little more dynamic. There are three buttons, refferencing three different tables. My alternative is to use three blocks of similar code; one function for each button, but i was trying to keep the code small since each button does a similar function.

joefawcett · July 21st, 2005, 02:21 AM

You appear to have misunderstood, what I meant was that as long as the names are unique you can do:

Code:

function getButtonFromTableName(TableName)
{
  var sButtonName = ("SubmitPO." + TableName + "Select");
  var oButton = document.getElementsByName(sButtonName)[0];
  //alert(oButton.value); //For testing
  return oButton
}

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)