Question

I dynamically generate some markup and inject it into the DOM like this:

content+='<td><a class="reportLink" onclick="showReport();return false;" href="'+layerResults.features[i].attributes['Information_External']+'">Info</a></td>';

I know it would be better to use jQuery to attach the click handler instead of using an inline handler.

The problems are, even using an inline handler and a function like this:

function showReport() {
  console.log('stopped');
}

Still doesn’t prevent the link from navigating away from my page.

The second problem is, when I try using

jQuery('.reportLink'.on('click', function(e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  console.log('clicked');
});

The event never gets attached. I’m using jQuery 1.7.2.

This is driving me a bit insane as it’s a simple task I’ve done about a zillion times in jQuery <= 1.5.

Answer 1

Delegate the event handler to a parent element that exists at the time the dom is loaded. You can replace body with that parent.

jQuery('body').on('click','.reportLink', function(e){
   e.preventDefault();
   console.log('clicked');
});

from jquery docs .on()

Event handlers are bound only to the currently selected elements; they must exist on the page at the time your code makes the call to .on(). To ensure the elements are present and can be selected, perform event binding inside a document ready handler for elements that are in the HTML markup on the page. If new HTML is being injected into the page, select the elements and attach event handlers after the new HTML is placed into the page. Or, use delegated events to attach an event handler, as described next.

Delegated events have the advantage that they can process events from descendant elements that are added to the document at a later time. By picking an element that is guaranteed to be present at the time the delegated event handler is attached, you can use delegated events to avoid the need to frequently attach and remove event handlers. This element could be the container element of a view in a Model-View-Controller design, for example, or document if the event handler wants to monitor all bubbling events in the document. The document element is available in the head of the document before loading any other HTML, so it is safe to attach events there without waiting for the document to be ready.

In addition to their ability to handle events on descendant elements not yet created, another advantage of delegated events is their potential for much lower overhead when many elements must be monitored. On a data table with 1,000 rows in its tbody, this example attaches a handler to 1,000 elements: