Make .val(value) faster for common use case

[RandomInsano]

I've built a web application that creates a few hundered forms with about six select boxes each in one page (~1200 elements).

Using the built-in functionality, it would take the creation function nearly 10 seconds to complete in Firefox 3.6. My fix for the problem was to get the direct node from jQuery, and set it's .value property. Now the page builds in < 1 second.

Before:

$(".UserName", formNode).val(1)

After:

$(".UserName", formNode)[0].value = 1;

[dmethvin]

From the code I can see that it would be faster to assign to the value property for that specific case. The general .val() code can take an array of values so that it can set select-multiple elements. I wonder if it would work to special-case the situation where the element was a select-one and the passed value was not an array.

[john]

This has been resolved in 1.6 (the code is much faster now). Although, in general, I would recommend just doing: .attr("value", someValue) if you know that you want to assign to the value attribute.