jQuery Map Function

Sometimes when you are making a web application you neeed to search some data. A lot of the time, it exists as an array in memory. I recently came across such a problem on a Phonegap project I’m working on. The app has to work offline, so my sorting needed to take place in Javascript. Since we’re using jQuery with this app, I decided to play with jQuery’s Map function. Map takes your array and performs an operation over each value in it. This was super handy in my case because it allowed me to search through my data at fast pace, without having to make an ajax call out to my database to do a search with MySQL.

Example:

var searchTerm = $("#searchField").val().toUpperCase();
var results = $.map(self.defaultProductList, function(product,i) {
	if(product.name.toUpperCase().search(searchTerm) != -1) {
		return product;
	}
});

searchTerm is the value that I’m searching for. .map takes an array as it’s first argument, and then a function as it’s second. I created an anonymous function that checks to see if the search term is in the current object. If it is, I return the value so it can be added to the final array. All in all, an excellent way of searching through data when you don’t have the luxury of a database to query.