Update: Ext 3.0RC1 has included something like this, but called Ext.copyTo. Obviously my name is better though.

We should have something like this:

Ext.applyOnly(this, config, ['width', 'height']);

You could use this every time you write a method or class that requires a config Object as one of it's parameters. These methods ought to only apply those properties of the config object they actually need, but usually this will just be done with an Ext.apply(this, config). This means anything in your object could be overwritten by this config object. Sometimes that's a good thing, but sometimes it's definitely not.

Ext.applyOnly() applies only a whitelist of the properties in the config object. These are specified by an optional third argument, which is an array of property names. Here's how you might write applyOnly:

/**
 * Applies only a pre-specified set of properties from one object to another
 * @param {Object} receiver The object to copy the properties to
 * @param {Object} sender The object to copy the properties from
 * @param {Array} whitelist The whitelist of properties to copy (e.g. ['width', 'height'])
 * @return {Object} The receiver object, with any of the whitelisted properties overwritten if they exist in sender
 */
Ext.applyOnly = function(receiver, sender, whitelist) {
  if (receiver && sender) {
    Ext.each(whitelist || [], function(item) {
      if (typeof sender[item] != 'undefined') receiver[item] = sender[item];
    }, this);
  };
  
  return receiver;
};