jQuery Timers is a high level abstraction of setTimeout and setInterval. It links into the jQuery chain so you can apply timers to elements directly in your code, leading to much more intuitive timer-based code. It also adds numerous advanced features such as labelling of timers and abstracted timer ids.

Features

Abstracted Timing

Saving the timer id when calling setTimeout and setInterval is annoying a troublesome if you need to cancel the timer at some other point in the code. You either have to pass it around as a parameter everywhere, or use a global variable. Timers creates a global cache of timer ids much like jQuery's events system creates a global cache of events.

Example

Timing Labels

Because jQuery timers connects timers to elements, it is advantageous to allow for a filtration of timers prior to cancelling, in case some other section of code is using jQuery timers for a different feature. Labels serve this purpose by allowing the programmer to assign a specific event a specific label. Labels are also automatically generated based on the timeout value of the timer if no specific label is generated. This means, you can cancel all timers originally set to activate 1000 ms later. This is merely a shortcut for programmers who prefer convention and implicit rules.

Example

Limited Timers

Limited Timers are a natural extension of the basic setTimeout/setInterval pair. Rather than limiting the programmer to one event or an unending chain of events, jQuery timers allows you to specify a specific number of times for the event to occur. This may be useful for pseudo-asynchronous looping and other time-related events.

Example

Intelligent Belay Event

A boolean argument can be passed when sending in a particularly expensive operation to a timer that signals to jQuery timers that you wish to cancel one instance of this operation if it attempts to run while a previous instance is still processing. This is not foolproof because of the single threaded nature of javascript, but it does work for the few cases I tested.

String Time Parsing

By default, setTimeout and setInterval take a millisecond count, but as human we tend to think in seconds. So if a string is provided as the interval/timeout in jQuery timers it will be parsed for standard time prefixes. So "2s" means 2 seconds, "250ms" means 250 milliseconds and so forth. The list of supported prefixes is larger than should ever be used.

Methods added to the jQuery chain

everyTime(interval : Integer | String, [label = interval : String], fn : Function, [times = 0 : Integer], [belay = false : Boolean])

everyTime will add the defined function (fn) as a timed event to run at a given time interval (interval) for a given number of times (times) optionally belaying event triggering if the previous iteration is not complete (belay). If times is set to 0, the number of times the method is called is unbounded. A label is also set for the given timed event either to the provided string (label) or to the string representation of the interval provided. Additionally, the interval can be defined by using a string such as "3s" for 3 seconds.

oneTime(interval : Integer | String, [label = interval : String], fn : Function)

oneTime will call the defined function (fn) a certain amount of time (interval) after being added to the elements in the jQuery object. A label (label) is also set for the timed event either to the provided string (label) or to the string representation of the interval provided.

stopTime([label : Integer | String], [fn : Function])

stopTime will stop any timed events with the provided label (label) and function (fn). If neither is specified, it will stop all timed events acting on the elements in the jQuery object. If only the function is provided, then it will stop all timed events calling that function regardless of label. Finally if only the label is provided, it will stop all timed events given that label at initialization.

Limitations

Integer based String parsing

Currently, the strings parsed for time only accept integers, so "2.5s" will be an error. This is not a difficult problem to fix and may be included in a future update.

As of 1.1 strings are parsed as floats so "2.5s" and its ilk are acceptable inputs.

Event Belay not Foolproof

As cautioned above, the intelligent event belaying is not guaranteed to work, and should be tested against your code base before relying on it.

Possible Memory Leaks

The storage technique used by jQuery timers to store the various timer ids is the same one that was used by jQuery prior to 1.2, but with the advent of $.data in jQuery 1.2 the event system was rewritten to use the $.data system which is more resilient to memory leaks. I have not yet done this, but I might for a future release.

The code now uses $.data. There might still be memory leaks, but they're not related to the storage technique anymore.

Releases

Official releases	Date	Size	Links	Status
1.1.2	2009-Feb-08	3.45 KB	Download Release notes	Recommended for 1.0.x