---
title: "Inspecting jQuery internals and storing information"
description:
  "Use jQuery.Data for inspecting jQuery internals and for storing information."
canonical_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/jquery-data-for-inspecting-jquery-internals-and-for-storing-information"
markdown_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/jquery-data-for-inspecting-jquery-internals-and-for-storing-information.md"
---

# Inspecting jQuery internals and storing information

Use jQuery.Data for inspecting jQuery internals and for storing information.

- Author: Neeraj Singh
- Published: July 23, 2009
- Categories: jQuery

Following code has been tested with jQuery 1.3 .

Let's say that I have bound all the links to display an alert.

```javascript
$("a").bind("click", function (e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  alert("clicked");
});
```

Mine is a large application and a co-worker has added another javascript file
which does this

```javascript
$("a").bind("click", function (e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  alert("hello");
});
```

Now if I click on a link I get two alerts. Not good. One way to debug would be
to go through all the included javascript files.

However it would be cool if there is a way to find all the click handlers
associated with an element.

jQuery has [data method](http://docs.jquery.com/Internals/jQuery.data) which it
uses internally to store information. jQuery uses data method to store all the
handlers associated with an element. We could use this information to our
advantage. Here I am trying to find out all the click handlers associated with
the first link.

```javascript
var output = jQuery.data($("a").get(0), "events");

jQuery.each(output.click, function (key, value) {
  alert(value);
});
```

The output looks like this

```javascript
function (e) { e.preventDefault(); alert("clicked"); }
function (e) { e.preventDefault(); alert("hello"); }
```

jQuery.data method is also very useful if you want to store some information
about an element. For example, in an application you need to store information
about people. In the html page you are only displaying names. And when a name is
clicked then you want to display age, hometown and the company they work for.
You can store information about each user using jQuery.data and you can retrieve
it when username is clicked.

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/jquery-data-for-inspecting-jquery-internals-and-for-storing-information)