Declaring Arrays of Objects within another object

Question

I have recently gotten into javascript (about four days ago), and I'm having troubles acclimating to the syntax a little bit. I'm creating a calender of sorts and I'm trying to get an array of objects (one for each month) to be declared within my "main" object, the calender. I have done copious amounts of googling and browsed all over W3Schools and can't seem to figure it out. So if I have

var calender = {
:
:...functions{},
months: [],

How would I go about getting objects inside of months and declaring their properties (i.e. months[0] would have a name of "January" and its number of days etc)? I am at a conceptual standstill. Do I accomplish this index by index, or can I just literally declare the objects at array creation? From what I grasped so far, it would seem normally I could just say something like var arr = {varName: "name",...(and so on)}, but it seems doing that in the brackets is not allowed, and I'm not sure syntactically where I access the indices. Or maybe I'm just doing this utterly bass ackwards. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Alex K. · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-08 18:56:16Z

2

One way; object literals within an array:

var calendar = {

    months: [
        {
            name : "Jan",
            days : 31
        },
        {
            name : "Feb",
            days : "28ish"
        }  
    ]
};

alert( calendar.months[0].days );

answered Feb 8, 2015 at 18:56

Alex K.

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4 Comments

LumberSzquatch Over a year ago

This is exactly what I was trying to do! Thank you. So basically the indices serve as the var name in a sense? Or is it bad to view it in that way?

Andy Over a year ago

Best to view them as key/value pairs. calendar has one key month that has an array as its value. In turn that array has two objects each of which have name and days values.

Alex K. Over a year ago

Kind of, (IMO) you should think of an Array (months) as a single entity (a variable, or in the example above the property of an object) that is a list containing values that are stored & accessed by a numeric index

LumberSzquatch Over a year ago

Thank you both, having a conceptual understanding helps a great deal. Coming from other OOPs that I am also learning, its good to understand the distinctions. Appreciate your time =)

Aprillion · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-08 19:01:54Z

1

Let's get back to basics, this is how you can write literal objects, arrays and objects containing arrays containing objects that contain arrays:

var my_object = {key1: "value1", key2: "value2"};
console.log(my_object.key1);

var my_array = ["value1", "value2"];
console.log(my_array[0]);

var my_compound = {a: [{b: "c", d: [0, 1, 2]},
                       {b: "e", d: [3, 4, 5]}]};
console.log(my_compound.a[1].d[0]);  // => 3
console.log(my_compound["a"][1]["d"][0]);  // same thing, perhaps more readable?

answered Feb 8, 2015 at 19:01

Aprillion

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