Writing a global animation queue in jquery

Question

Adding a sequence of animations to a single dom element using jQuery is extremely easy. jQuery queues everything up nicely for me and I basically don't have to do anything.

However making a sequence of animations over a number of elements (eg pictureDiv fades out, then demographicsDiv fades in) is much harder. I've written a plugin type thing to make it easier as below:

var something.createAnimationQueue = function () {

    // jQuery queues up animations on each dom element (/ jquery object)
    // We want to queue up animations over different dom elements so 
    // use a jquery object on a blank element
    var animationQueue = $({});

    return {
        add: function (animationFunctionContext, animationFunction) {
            var args = $.makeArray(arguments).slice(2);
            animationQueue.queue(function (next) {
                $.when(animationFunction.apply(animationFunctionContext, args)).done(next)
            })
        }
    }
}

Which is used thusly

        var animationQueue = something.createAnimationQueue();

        animationQueue.add(pictureDiv, pictureDiv.fadeOut, 'slow');
        animationQueue.add(demographicsDiv, demographicsDiv.fadeIn, 'slow');

My questions are:

1) Have I missed something? Is there an easier way of doing this that I didn't know about.

2) If not, is there a way to avoid passing pictureDiv and pictureDiv.fadeOut to the animationQueuer? (I tried and couldn't think of one)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Since you are using .apply and reassigning this, you could simply use

var animationQueue = something.createAnimationQueue();

animationQueue.add(pictureDiv, $.fn.fadeOut, 'slow');
animationQueue.add(demographicsDiv, $.fn.fadeIn, 'slow');

And if you really wanted to, you could turn that into a string:

var something.createAnimationQueue = function () {

    // jQuery queues up animations on each dom element (/ jquery object)
    // We want to queue up animations over different dom elements so 
    // use a jquery object on a blank element
    var animationQueue = $({});

    return {
        add: function (animationFunctionContext, method) { // <----
            var args = $.makeArray(arguments).slice(2);
            animationQueue.queue(function (next) {
                $.when($.fn[method].apply(animationFunctionContext, args)).done(next) // <----
            })
        }
    }
}

var animationQueue = something.createAnimationQueue();

animationQueue.add(pictureDiv, 'fadeOut', 'slow'); // <----
animationQueue.add(demographicsDiv, 'fadeIn', 'slow'); // <----

Note, however, this can't be used for more than just animations now. You could use this with any jQuery method that returns a promise object, such as .ajax, .post, .get, .getJSON, etc. if you used it like you originally had it.