This is the last in a series of posts on bubbling, delegation and how to delegate events with jQuery. You should already have read the articles What does event bubbling mean and Event Delegation in JavaScript, or have a grasp on their topics.

Event Delegation with jQuery

At the end of the last post, we had a table with hundreds of rows. Each row contained a <a /> to which we wanted to attach a click handler to. We added a single handler to the <table/> element (we delegated the event handler to it) to capture the event.

The correct way to delegate an event handler to the <table> for a click on the <a /> in jQuery would be;

$('#the-table').on('click', 'a', function (e) {
    alert('You clicked row #' + $(this).closest('tr').prop('rowIndex')); 

    e.preventDefault();
});

See it in action here. In words, we capture the element we wish to delegate the event to ($('#the-table')) and call the on() method on it. The event type is the first parameter (click), and the second parameter is a selector which pinpoints the descendant(s) we wish to handle events for (a). The third parameter is the event handler.

Inside the event handler, this is the element the event occurred on (e.g. the <a /> that was clicked). Inside the Event object;

1. e.target is the element the event occurred on (the same value as this).
2. e.delegateTarget is the element the event is delegated to (the <table /> element).

Note that jQuery has the same caveat as normal JavaScript when delegating an event to an element; the element you’re delegating to (the table in this case) must exist in the DOM at the time you attach the event.

Controlling Event Bubbling with jQuery

A developer can prevent an event bubbling any further up the list of ancestors if they want to.

To do this, call the stopPropagation() on the event object passed to an event handler. This will execute all other event handlers bound to the current element, but will not propagate up the DOM. You can see this in action here. Even though we’ve bound a click handler to all elements in the ancestor chain, you only see alerts for the a, span and h1, as the h1 handler prevents the event bubbling further.

stopImmediatePropagation() will also prevent the event propagating, but it’ll also stop any other event handlers bound to the current element from firing.

You can check whether an event’s had it’s propagation stopped via the isPropagationStopped() method and isImmediatePropagationStopped() methods.

Another way a developer can stop the event propagating is by returning false from an event handler. This is equivilant to calling stopPropagation() and preventDefault(). I personally recommend against using this shortcut, as it’s use can cause confusion; instead use the methods themselves to make your code more meaningful.

This is the second post in a series on bubbling, delegation and how to delegate events with jQuery. It assumes you’ve already read the first post What does event bubbling mean, or already have a grasp on event bubbling in JavaScript.

Event Delegation

When providing examples, I’m going to refer to the HTML we used as an example in the first post (shown below):

<div>
    <h1>
        <a href="#">
            <span>Hello</span>
        </a>
    </h1>
</div>

Also note that I’m still not interested in adding support to older versions of IE (<9). You’ll have to add the normal fallback to attachEvent instead of addEventListener if you want to support them, and find an alternative for querySelector/ querySelectorAll. The event target property exists as srcTarget in older versions of IE.

So now we understand event bubbling… but how does it help us?

It means if we want to add an event handler for a click on the <span> element in the above example, we don’t need to add it to the <span> element; we can add it to any of it’s ancestors… as shown here;

window.addEventListener('load', function () {
    document.querySelector('div').addEventListener('click', function (e) {
        if (e.target.nodeName === "SPAN") {
            alert('Click event fired on the SPAN element'); 
        }
    }, false);
});

But yes, I hear you ask me again… how does this help us?

Imagine you have a table with hundreds of rows. Each row contains a <a /> to which you want to attach a click handler to. With no event-bubbling you’d have to bind the event handler to each <a />; which involves iterating over each element and adding an event handler individually to each one. See it in action here. Does it feel efficient to you?;

window.addEventListener('load', function () {
    // Add loads of rows
    var rows = '';

    for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
        rows += '<tr><td>' + i + '</td><td><a href="#">Click Here</a></td></tr>';
    }

    document.querySelector("table").innerHTML = rows;
    // End setup

    // Attach event to each element
    var elements = document.querySelectorAll('#the-table a');

    for (var i=0;i<elements.length;i++) {
        elements[i].addEventListener('click', function (e) {
            alert('You clicked row #' + this.parentNode.previousSibling.innerText);
        }, false);
    };

    alert('Event handler bound to ' + elements.length + ' elements');
});

Instead, what we could do is bind one click handler to the <table />.

document.querySelector('#the-table').addEventListener('click', function (e) {
    if (e.target.nodeName === "A") {
        alert('You clicked row #' + e.target.parentNode.previousSibling.innerText);
    }
});

See this in action here.

Secondly, imagine you load some content dynamically and you want some capture some events on it. You can only add event handlers to elements once they exist (makes sense right?), so without event-bubbling you’d have to re-bind the same event handlers to your content each time you add the content.You can see this in an example here, where we add rows to the table programmatically when you click a button.

However, because the <table /> element does exist in the DOM when the page is rendered, we can add an event handler to this no problem, as shown here. This is a common problem when loading elements via AJAX as well; and attaching the event handler to an element that is in the DOM from the page load is the solution.

So in summary, you should be taking advantage of event bubbling by using event delegation if you want to handle an event for multiple elements, or you want to bind events to dynamically loaded data.

Now move onto the next article; Event Delegation with jQuery

“Delegation” and “bubbling” are terms that gets thrown round a lot in JavaScript; but what exactly do these terms mean?

This is the first in a series of posts on bubbling, delegation and how to delegate events with jQuery; What does event bubbling mean, Event Delegation in JavaScript and Event Delegation with jQuery

Event Bubbling

In JavaScript, events bubble. This means that an event propagates through the ancestors of the element the event fired on. Lets show what this means using the HTML markup below;

<div>
    <h1>
        <a href="#">
            <span>Hello</span>
        </a>
    </h1>
</div>

Lets assume we click the span, which causes a click event to be fired on the span; nothing revolutionary so far. However, the event then propagates (or bubbles) to the parent of the span (the <a>), and a click event is fired on that. This process repeats for the next parent (or ancestor) up to the document element.

You can see this in action here. Click “Hello” and see the events as they get fired. The code used is shown below;

window.addEventListener("load", function () {
    var els = document.querySelectorAll("*");

    for (var i = 0; i < els.length; i++) {
        els[i].addEventListener("click", function () {
            alert('Click event fired on the ' + this.nodeName + ' element');
        });
    }
});

^{Note that I’m not interested in adding support to older versions of IE (<9). You’ll have to add the normal fallback to attachEvent instead of addEventListener if you want to support them, and find an alternative for querySelector/ querySelectorAll.}

That’s all event bubbling is; an event fired on an element bubbles through its ancestor chain (i.e. the event is also fired on those elements). It’s important to note that this isn’t a jQuery feature, nor is it something that a developer must turn on; it’s a fundamental part of JavaScript that has always existed.

Ok, that’s a little bit of a lie… sort of.

By default, not all events bubble. For instance submit does not normally bubble, nor does change. However, jQuery masks this in the event handling code using all sorts of voodoo, so it will seem that they do bubble when using jQuery.

Now move onto the next article; Event Delegation in JavaScript