After looking around at your tutorials and some of the links you recommended, I think what I was trying to do was something like this… The goal being to create multiple instances of an object that is populated with properties, but then each instance can have different local values to work with.

var existing = {prop1: ”, prop2: [], prop3: {}, prop4 : function (){} };
var constructor = function (a,b) {this.a = a; this.b = b;};
constructor.prototype = existing;
var instances = [], i = 0;

do {
instances.push( new constructor(i,somevar) ), i+=1;
} while (i < 10)

for (var i in instances) alert( instances[i].prop1 );

You can’t just use the new operator with an object. It will only work with a function. This is because the constructor function will have logic in it to construct an object. It’s not just cloning an existing one.

If you wanted to clone an existing object, you could iterate through all of its properties and copy them into a new object:
var person =
{
prop1: “one”,
prop2: “two”
}
var person2 = {};
for(var property in person)
{
person2[property] = person[property]
}
alert(person2.prop1 + ” ” + person2.prop2);

There’s an interesting article about doing this (make sure you check out the discussion) http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2007/Jun/07/javascript.clone

Another way to do it is to use javascript’s prototype chaining feature to make one object “inherit” from another:
function clone(existing)
{
var constructor = function() {};
constructor.prototype = existing;

return new constructor();
}
var person3 = clone(person2);
alert(person3.prop1 + ” ” + person3.prop2);

It’s a bit more complicated than regular inheritance, javascript isn’t a class based language like java or C#, but it’s a similar general idea. This is an idea that I want to talk about in a future article but there’s plenty of good information about it on the web. Try googling for javascript prototype inheritance and javascript prototype chaining.

Thanks for the interesting question. :)

var myObj = {
dog:{},
cat:[],
goat: function(){},
construct: function(params) {}
}

var instances = [], i = 0;

do {
instances.push( new myObj(params) ), i+=1;
} while (i < 10)

BY THE WAY, this is one of (well, tonight it’s definitely the best!) javascript object tutorials i’v e found. Your stuff is complete, clear and well written.