How to make this jquery function more efficient?
<p>I have a checkout I'm playing with which has some up and down arrows next to the quantity input of each item.</p>

<p>I have some repeated code and it doesn't seem that efficient. Hopefully you can help.</p>

<p>Each item looks something like this (please excuse my non-standard-conforming item_id attribute for now)</p>

<pre><code>&lt;div class="qty_ctrl_wrap"&gt;
  &lt;input class="bag_qty" type="text" value="4" item_id="532" name="product_quantity"&gt;
  &lt;div class="arrows"&gt;
    &lt;div class="more"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;div class="less"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>Here's the full jquery function:</p>

<pre><code>$('#checkout .arrows div').live('click',function(){

    var item_id = $(this).parent().prev('input').attr('item_id');
    var current_qty = $(this).parent().prev('input').val();

    if($(this).attr('class') == 'more') {

        var new_qty = parseInt(current_qty) + 1;

    } else {

        var new_qty = parseInt(current_qty) - 1;

    }

    // change the input on screen for visual reasons...
    $(this).parent().prev('input').val(new_qty);


    // submit the changes
        $.ajax({
        type: 'POST',
        url: '/backend/product_purchase_items.php',
        data: 'qty='+new_qty+'&amp;item_id='+item_id,
        cache: false,
        success: function(data) {
          $('#product_purchase_items').html(data);
        }
        });     

});
</code></pre>

<p>As you can see, I'm repeating the following thing 3 times:</p>

<pre><code>$(this).parent().prev('input')
</code></pre>

<p>I've been trying to work out how to put that in a variable so I don't have to repeat that code.</p>

<p>But in addition to that, the way this works is that if you hit the arrow 3 times, it does <strong>3 seperate ajax posts</strong>. Ideally there would be a slight pause before sending the post.</p>

<p>How does one make a pause of say 300 milliseconds to see if there are further clicks of the arrows before submitting the post?</p>
