Question

As the question states, what I’m attempting to do is have a function that is called when a DOM element is removed from the DOM, much like a destructor.

I looked into unload, but from my understanding that’s only called when the browser navigates away from the page.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I don’t know if it’s that what you’re looking for. Not really pretty code, just to show what I would like to use:

// Just for this script's sake, you'll want to do it differently
var body = $("body");
var element = $('#loadingBlock');

// Bind the "destructor" firing event
body.bind("elementDeleted", function (element) {
  // your "destructor" code
});

// Trigger the event, delete element, can be placed in a function, overloaded, etc.
body.trigger("elementDeleted", element);
element.remove();

There are of course solutions based on watching the DOM directly but the problem is the browser compatibility. You should probably check out mutation events.