Calling coffeescript functions from console

Question

Playing a little with coffeescript and Rails 3.1.0.rc4. Have this code:

yourMom = (location) ->
  console.log location

yourMom "wuz hur"

When the page loads, this outputs "wuz hur" properly. But when I try to call

yourMom("wuz hur")

from the chrome js console (as I do sometimes to test normal JS functions), I get a "ReferenceError: yourMom is not defined"

Are functions generated by coffeescript available in this way?

Answer 1

an easier way to share global methods/variables is to use @ which means this.

@yourMom = (location) ->
  console.log location

yourMom "wuz hur"

Nicer syntax and easier to read, but I don't encourage you to create global methods/variables

Answer 2

This happens because coffeescript wraps everything in a closure. The JavaScript output of that code is actually:

(function() {
  var yourMom;
  yourMom = function(location) {
    return console.log(location);
  };
  yourMom("wuz hur");
}).call(this);

If you want to export it to the global scope, you can either do:

window.yourMom = yourMom = (location) ->
  console.log location

or

this.yourMom = yourMom = (location) ->
  console.log location

Answer 3

I'm not sure about Rails but the CoffeeScript compiler has an option (--bare) to compile without the function wrapper. Fine for playing but it does pollute the global scope.

Answer 4

this link might solve your problem Rails - Calling CoffeeScript from JavaScript Wrap your functions in a unique namespace and then you can acess these functions from wnywhere