Question

I create a jQuery Tool’s Overlay on a trigger as such:

$('button').overlay(
{
 ... 
});

How can I disable and re-enable the overlay later on ? I want my $('button') element to remain as a link, but instead of displaying the Overlay on click, I want to show an alert ?

Something like that :

if( needToDisableOverlay() )
{
   $('button').overlay().disable(); // no such thing...
   $('button').bind( 'click.alert', function()
   {
      alert( 'The overlay has been disabled' );    
   });
}
// later on
if( needToEnableOverlay() )
{
    $('button').unbind( 'click.alert' );
    $('button').overlay().enable(); // no such thing...
}

I know I can use

$('button').unbind('click');

to remove all click handlers from the button (including the Overlay load() function), but I don’t think this is a clean way of doing it especially if I have other click handlers I want to maintain.

Maybe I can use flag in the Overlay’s onBeforeLoad handler and return false if the flag is set ?

What is the proper of achieving this ?

Answer 1

Answering my own question:

Maybe I can use flag in the Overlay’s onBeforeLoad handler and return false if the flag is set ?

This works nicely, and looks clean. No unbinding required.

I guess I should have tried before posting — then again, maybe this will help other people in the future 😉