Mutable variable is accessible from closure. How can I fix this?

Question

I am using Typeahead by twitter. I am running into this warning from Intellij. This is causing the \"window.location.href\" for each link to be the last item in my list of i

Answer 1

You need to nest two functions here, creating a new closure that captures the value of the variable (instead of the variable itself) at the moment the closure is created. You can do this using arguments to an immediately-invoked outer function. Replace this expression:

function (item) { // what to do when item is selected
    comp = me.map[item];
    if (typeof comp === 'undefined') {
        return this.query;
    }

    window.location.href = me.format(gotoUrl, comp.s, target.destination);

    return item;
}

With this:

(function (inner_target) {
    return function (item) { // what to do when item is selected
        comp = me.map[item];
        if (typeof comp === 'undefined') {
            return this.query;
        }

        window.location.href = me.format(gotoUrl, comp.s, inner_target.destination);

        return item;
    }
}(target))

Note that we pass target into the outer function, which becomes the argument inner_target, effectively capturing the value of target at the moment the outer function is called. The outer function returns an inner function, which uses inner_target instead of target, and inner_target will not change.

(Note that you can rename inner_target to target and you will be okay -- the closest target will be used, which would be the function parameter. However, having two variables with the same name in such a tight scope could be very confusing and so I have named them differently in my example so that you can see what's going on.)