Visual Studio intellisense for NWF$ - jQuery inside Nintex Forms

Those who have written custom JavaScript to act within Nintex Forms are probably familiar with the NWF$ construct which is the name that Nintex has given to the jQuery object - which by convention is usually called just $.

This allows us to harness the power of jQuery but necessitates using a different naming convention that Visual Studio intellisense just doesn't understand. So, here's a quick tip on how you can get everything working nicely in your IDE.

Firstly, work out the version of jQuery that is in use (I can see from tracing my browser session that Nintex Forms 365 is currently using version 1.10.2, from https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.10.2.min.js).

In your Visual Studio project, open up the Package Manager Console (you can find it from the "View" menu under "Other Windows"), and type in the following command (note the version number is used to make sure intellisense knows exactly which commands should be available):

Install-Package jQuery-vsdoc -Version 1.10.2

This will bring in the appropriate files for jQuery and intellisense, but intellisense will only work against the $ or jQuery names, not against the NWF$ name as used by Nintex.

To allow intellisense to understand the NWF$ name, we need to amke a small modification to one of the files added by the Package Installation process. In the Solution Explorer, find the file whose name ends with vsdoc.js - in my case, this is jquery-1.10.2-vsdoc.js. Open up this file and scroll right to the bottom, where you'll see this fragment:

jQuery.fn = jQuery.prototype;
jQuery.fn.init.prototype = jQuery.fn;
window.jQuery = window.$ = jQuery;
})(window);

Now add the following line:

NWF$ = jQuery;

so that the end of the file now looks like this:

jQuery.fn = jQuery.prototype;
jQuery.fn.init.prototype = jQuery.fn;
window.jQuery = window.$ = jQuery;
NWF$ = jQuery;
})(window);

Save the file, and that's it!

Now, when you start using NWF$, Visual Studio will understand what you're doing and will help suggest jQuery functions for you:

Visual Studio intellisense against the NWF$ object