Question

(jQuery) Is there a work around for IE's bad "change event" implementation?

Asked by: paddycobbett

Here come's another IE complaint! This issue has been blogged all over the place with many possible solutions, however none seem to quite cut it and certainly not for my needs.

The issue is how IE handles change events, which is does completely different from all other major browsers. My particular case is with checkbox's. A change event should be thrown when the checkbox is checked or unchecked. The problem is that the change event isn't thrown until the checkbox or the rest of the screen grabs focus. The inconsistency between IE and other browsers for me renders using the change event useless. People work around using the onclick event handler, however this does not work if the state of a checkbox is being changed programatically, which should still result in a change event being thrown since a change has occurred(!)

Despite this issue being blogged in many places i haven't seen it posted here and often tend to get good responses here. Can anyone give a workaround so that IE reacts to changes (throwing a change event) immediately once it's state changes, which includes it being changes programatically i.e:

$('#mycheckbox').attr('checked', true); // should throw a change event IF the value was previously false

I'm using jQuery but any straight solution in javascript will be fine.

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Asked On
2009-11-05 at 01:05:23ID24873756
Tags

jQuery

,

javascript

Topics

JavaScript

,

Jquery

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: manjunathubPosted on 2009-11-05 at 03:13:35ID: 25748315

it is a serious bug in IE you can complain to Microsoft people.. so they can rectify it in there future release.. and it is a good observation...

 

by: Terry_focusPosted on 2009-11-05 at 05:41:43ID: 25749286

I always use the 'click' event and determine what state the checkbox is internally.

In this case I would trigger the click event once I have made the change. Extra line of code but good work around, like so

$("#checkbox").click(function(){
   if(this.checked){
      //perform is checked
   }
   else{
     //Perform not checked
   }
});
//When performing JavaScript changes
$('#mycheckbox').attr('checked', true).click();//The .click() triggers the onclick event
                                              
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by: paddycobbettPosted on 2009-11-05 at 05:43:43ID: 25749305

Sadly i think you're right, and thanks for atleast confirming my suspicions even if i don't like it! :) Atleast then i don't waste my time, i have worked around not using the change event, but my code would be so much cleaner if it could be used as was intended!

Am going to leave the question posted a while longer before awarding credit, many thanks.

 

by: hieloPosted on 2009-11-05 at 07:19:51ID: 25750372

>>People work around using the onclick event handler, however this does not work if the state of a checkbox is being changed programatically,

If I understand correctly, you have something similar to:
<input type="checkbox" id="chk" onclick="someHandlerFunction()"/>

and the state of the checkbox is being changed by doing something similar to:
$("chk").attr("checked","checked")
or perhaps:
document.getElementById("chk").checked=true;

and then you are expecting that action to call someHandlerFunction(). IF that is the case do NOT change the attribute. Instead do literal "click" on the checkbox. On other words, do:
$("#chk").click();

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
	<head>
		<title>hielo</title>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript">
		$(function(){
			//bind the function handler upon load
			$("#chk").bind("click",someFunctionHandler);	
			
			
			//periodically "click" the checkbox programatically
			setInterval(function(){$("#chk").click() }, 3000);
		});
		
		function someFunctionHandler(){
			//this will be called every time the checkbox changes state
			//this.checked will give you the current state of the checkbox
			//true=checked; false=not checked
		}
		
		
		</script>
	</head>
	<body>
	<form>
		<input type="checkbox" id="chk" value="1"/>
	</form>
	</body>
</html>
                                              
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by: paddycobbettPosted on 2009-11-09 at 07:33:01ID: 25776748

Hi guys,

I think you've missed an important case, whereby programatically i may want to set the "checked" value of a checkbox to a specific state without necessarily knowing whether it is already in that state, and i only want the code to run if it's state was changed. I do like the suggestion to never change the state via setting the attribute, but rather to always change it via click().

So i think the solution is really to always check the state before calling the click, i.e:

When changing a checkbox to "checked=true" do:

if (chkbox.attr('checked')!=true) chkbox.click();


.. and similarly when changing to "checked=false" do:

if (chkbox.attr('checked')!=false) chkbox.click();


I think this ensures that the code is cross-browser.. and allows me to treat the checkbox click() event as an onchange() event. I am happy to award credit since the above comments inspired my solution, which is now MUCH better than what i had been doing(!)


Beforehand however, can anyone see a flaw in my solution?

 

by: hieloPosted on 2009-11-09 at 16:26:15ID: 25781464

>>if (chkbox.attr('checked')!=true) chkbox.click();
>>if (chkbox.attr('checked')!=false) chkbox.click();
that's exactly how I would expect you to set the checkbox to a specific state (as opposed to $('#mycheckbox').attr('checked', true).click() ). Why? SInce you already found out that:
$('#mycheckbox').attr('checked', true);

does not work in IE, but it works in others, then using something lke:
$('#mycheckbox').attr('checked', true).click();

should theoretically call the onchange event handler immediately followed by the click handler in NON-IE browsers. When both, the onchange event handler and the onclick event handler are the same function reference, then this may NOT be what you want. I didn't realize earlier that this was previously suggested:
$('#mycheckbox').attr('checked', true).click();

but I suspect it will create cross-browser problems. Stick with:
>> if (chkbox.attr('checked')!=true) chkbox.click();

 

by: paddycobbettPosted on 2009-11-12 at 06:30:04ID: 31650402

thanks :)

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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