jQuery Forum

The normal use of a widget does not include its "namespace". Usually people pick a unique name and just hope no other programmer uses the same name.  

I found $.widget.bridge to help deal with namespaced widget. It does not implement using the namespace in a widget call, but handles it giving it a new pseudonym. 
#7489 (autocomplete fails when new widget 'jqn.menu' is created) – jQuery UI  

Actually, this is  a proper and supported way to create an instance of a widget. $.namespace.widgetName is a real constructor with an optional new (just like jQuery ). However, since you're now in a plain OO system, and not a jQuery plugin, you cannot rely on the same behavior that you get from the jQuery plugins. Specifically, the implicit iteration that works with 0, 1, or many elements doesn't exist. The constructor supports a few cases:

I read that using method of that widget invocation gets strange as well.  Is that still true?

Getting back to the OP’s question,   They have to make sure they pass a selector that matches something.  

Hi, @scott, I got the following suggestion on stackoverflow :

$ ( "mySelector" ). each ( $ .myNamespace .myWidget(null, this) );

It seems to solve my problem -- it passes a jquery object, but could be easily changed to pass its corresponding element. Nevertheless, it introduces some overhead and makes the plugin interface less user friendly . Otherwise, I solved my problem overriding the method _createWidget on my base class:

$.widget("myNamespace.myBase", {
    _createWidget: function (options, element) {
        if ($(element).length == 0) return null;
        return this._superApply(arguments);
    }, ...
}

I can also easily change my implementation to pass the elements, instead of the selector (and I will!), but I want your opinion about overriding the method _createWidget . Is it a supported practice or should I create some helper method to create my widget instances?

Hi again, @scott, otherwise, is there a way to use the syntax $("selector").myWidget(myOptions) with namespace?

Thank you, @scott,

As the $.widget factory supports declaring widgets with namespace, I expected that it was better supported on jquery traditional way of programming -- say selectors . Actually, it was working because of the coincidence on create that you pointed out. Thank you for the heads up, so now my code avoids possible future inexplicable breaks on future versions.

About my solution, namespacing is important because I am auto-loading widgets based on css classes, so I created a helper method on my javascript library to handle it and call this method after declaring each widget:

myLib.add($.myNamespace.myWidget)

function add (factory, selector) {
  if (!factory.prototype.widget) throw ("'factory' must be a widget")
  if (selector == undefined) selector = factory.prototype.widgetName;
  $(selector).each(function () { factory(null, this) });
}

I left the extra validation on _createWidget , earlier error messages for client developers -- having "owner is undefined " error from acceptData would make inexperienced developers confused.

Please fell free to comment on it and thank you very much for all.

Although Scott probably won’t like my syntax, I just tested several widgets with my code that modifies any widget.