Sharing settings across methods in namespaced jQuery plugin

Question

I\'m writing a plugin and following the jQuery documentation\'s recommended practice http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Authoring when it comes to namespacing and multiple methods.

Answer 1

I didn't look at your plugin template, but I wanted to share this jQuery plugin formatting... it adds a reverse reference to the DOM object in jQuery's stored data. This makes it very easy to access the plugin functions and/or variables even from outside of the plugin closure.

Here is a post describing the plugin structure in more detail.

So to access a function inside the plugin, you simply use the data object:

$('a').data('myplugin').function_name();

or even get a variable from the plugin settings

var height = $('a').data('myplugin').options.height;

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But to answer your question, to make your options available to other functions inside the closure, just define the option variable outside of the init function:

(function( $ ){
        var options, methods = {
            init: function(customSettings) {
                options = {
                    debug: true
                }