Lightbox is the most popular way of showing large image on click on thumbnail over the web. Lot of websites are using the LightBox. Normally, We use lightbox using the “rel” attribute of anchor tag. We use lightbox this way:-
<a href="images/image-1.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="thumb"><img src="images/thumb-1.jpg" width="100" height="40" alt="" /></a>Here, we provided the “rel” attribute as “lightbox” in hyperlink. What lightbox script do is when page load completed its check all the hyperlinks of page and if rel=”lightbox” is exists them it push this link into an array.
Lightbox extract the “href” and “title” attributes of each link having rel=”lightbox” and push all of them into array. “href” is normally the URL of larger image. Lingtbox also add “click” event on all of these hyperlinks and when user click on any particular thumbnail the lightbox starts.
Here, I’m showing a way in which you can initialize the lightbox by using the JSON string. Basically, this JSON string contains the “href” and “title” information which we want to show. We can create this string dynamically using any server side scripting language. Here is one of sample JSON string.
<script language="javascript"> var img_json = [['pics/photo-80.jpg', 'Title 01'],['pics/photo-128.jpg', 'Title 02'],['pics/photo-160.jpg', 'Title 03'],['pics/photo-165.jpg', 'Title 04'],['pics/photo-205.jpg', 'Title 05'],['pics/photo-206.jpg', 'Title 06']]; </script>
You can learn more about JSON here.
We also need to do some small changes in lightbox javascript file so it use our JSON string for image array instead of create array by checking the “rel” attribute in whole page.
You can download the customized lightbox javascript file from here.
You can see the working demo here.
1. Remove the “imageLink” parameter from start function because now we not starting LightBox by not clicking any thumbnail.
start: function(imageLink)
function to
start: function()
2. Now we are initializing the “imageArray” using JSON string.
this.imageArray = [];
to
this.imageArray = img_json;
3. Comment these line of code inside start function bacause we not want to check whole page links for lightbox.
/*if ((imageLink.rel == 'lightbox')){
// if image is NOT part of a set, add single image to imageArray
this.imageArray.push([imageLink.href, imageLink.title]);
} else {
// if image is part of a set..
this.imageArray =
$$(imageLink.tagName + '[href][rel="' + imageLink.rel + '"]').
collect(function(anchor){ return [anchor.href, anchor.title]; }).
uniq();
while (this.imageArray[imageNum][0] != imageLink.href) { imageNum++; }
}*/4. Add function startLightBox() at the end of Lightbox class. This function start the lightbox when we click on the link having id=”start”.
startLightBox: function() { var th = this; Event.observe($('start'), 'click', function () { th.start(); }); }
5. Add this line in initialize() function to call “startLightBox()” function which create the click event on link having id=”start”.
this.startLightBox();
After completing all the five changes in lightbox.js you need to create a link with id = “start” in your HTML file. When you click on this link its starts the LightBox. Here is the code for HTML file.
<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Initialize LightBox using JSON string and Run it from Flash</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> <script src="js/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/lightbox.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <a href="#" id="start">Start LightBox</a> </body> <script language="javascript"> var img_json = [['pics/photo-80.jpg', 'Title 01'],['pics/photo-128.jpg', 'Title 02'],['pics/photo-160.jpg', 'Title 03'],['pics/photo-165.jpg', 'Title 04'],['pics/photo-205.jpg', 'Title 05'],['pics/photo-206.jpg', 'Title 06']]; </script> </html>