VF Woes

Very quick blog this week and it's around an issue I had allocating dynamic Ids to Apex Input fields.

I had a recent requirement that needed me to change the values in some input fields in a targetted way on a VF page. My first thought was to assign a dynamic ID to the <apex:inputfield> only to find that you need concrete values in here.

Found a clever way round this that allows you to find fields by their <apex:inputfield styleclass="{!variable}"

As the JavaScript function getByElementClass is not support in all browsers I needed to write something quick and functional (read dirty) that did the job without using any external libraries or Frameworks i.e. jQuery Here is a very simple JS function that will retrieve all the elements of a certain classname to allow you to 'do stuff' to them.

function getElementByClassName(cl) {
    var elements = [];
    var elem = document.getElementsByTagName('input');
    for (var i = 0; i < elem.length; i++) {
        if (elem[i].className.indexOf(cl)!=-1) elements.push(elem[i]); 
    }
    return elements;
}; 

Not rocket science but you can extend it to use regular expressions etc... and all you need to do it pass it the classname you are looking for. Won't solve a lot of problems but it definitely solved one for me today :)