Display:none is preventing click event in jQuery

Question

I have a search box with search suggestion:

<input id="searchBar" />
<div id="searchSuggestion"></div>

The div searchSuggestion is automatically updated via jQuery ajax when an input is made (code not shown). To hide / show the autocomplete suggestions (which appear below the search textbox), I use:

$searchBar.blur(function () {
    $searchSuggestion.css("display", "none");
});
$searchBar.focus(function () {
    $searchSuggestion.css("display", "");
});

So far so good.

Now, I want to auto-fill the textbox when a user clicks on a search suggestion item:

$searchSuggestion.on("click", ".item", function () {
    alert("clicked");
});

The problem is, clicking the search suggestion item causes the textbox to lose focus, therefore display:none is set on the search suggestion items, which causes the click event to not fire!

If I remove the display:none code, everything works fine.

How can I work around this conflict?

you've pretty much laid out the logic you need. when you click on *anything but* the searchSuggestion, hide the search suggestions. — Kevin B, Jan 17 '17 at 16:13
Delegate the click. If event.target is not suggestion or searchbar, hide — mplungjan, Jan 17 '17 at 16:14
@KevinB exactly how to do that? Capture the global mouse-click event? — kevin, Jan 17 '17 at 16:18
@KevinB wouldn't that lead to performance issues though? If the page has a lot of elements. — kevin, Jan 17 '17 at 16:24
@kevin the number of elements doesn't affect how many times the event would be bound/called — Kevin B, Jan 17 '17 at 16:24
@KevinB I mean if this strategy is repeatedly used for many elements in the page. — kevin, Jan 17 '17 at 16:26
@kevin you should be able to do all of that with a single click event, but, yes, having 50 click events on the same element could be a performance problem. — Kevin B, Jan 17 '17 at 16:27

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

2

Ended up with this solution, which prevents the mousedown event from propagating and causing the element to lose focus before click (which requires mouseup) is fired:

$searchSuggestion.on("mousedown", function (e) {
    e.preventDefault();
}).on("click", ".item", function () {
    alert("clicked");
});

edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

Community

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answered Jan 17 '17 at 16:38

kevin

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '17 at 16:20

1

You can workaround this by adding a small timeout in your blur handler, try this for example:

$searchBar.blur(function () {
    setTimeout(function() {
        $searchSuggestion.css("display", "none");
    }, 150);
});

answered Jan 17 '17 at 16:20

Tha'er AlAjlouni ثائر العجلوني

14,069
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isnt' this missing the whole.... clearTimeout when clicking on a suggestion item portion? – Kevin B Jan 17 '17 at 16:22
Is it possible to do this without timeout? Ideally, the moment when the user clicks the suggestion, the focus is already known. I just need the click() event to fire before the blur() event. – kevin Jan 17 '17 at 16:22
@KevinB No need to clear `timeout`s since it creates only one instance, intervals on the other hand needs to be cleared – Tha'er AlAjlouni ثائر العجلوني Jan 17 '17 at 16:23
@Tha'erAl-Ajlouni Right, but... if you don't clear it, then it's going to hide shortly after clicking a suggestion item... I guess that works if it's what you want – Kevin B Jan 17 '17 at 16:24
@kevin the `blur` handler is not aware of `click` event, and cannot know which item was clicked! – Tha'er AlAjlouni ثائر العجلوني Jan 17 '17 at 16:24
@KevinB yes that was the intention, click then hide as required in the question. – Tha'er AlAjlouni ثائر العجلوني Jan 17 '17 at 16:25

Display:none is preventing click event in jQuery

2 Answers2