Question

I have a HTML markup that looks like

<ul>
  ...

    <li>
      <ul class="x">
        ...
        <a href="#"...

How can I get the parent ul.x element from a click event hooked on the link?

this.parentNode works if the UL is the parent element, but if it’s one of the ancestors I have to use this.parentNode.parentNode depending on how many parent elements are in between…

Can I somehow get the first UL parent?

Answer 1

For performance,

You can also use jquery on like below, jquery eventObject also has a property named delegateTarget, which could be useful in your case.

$('ul.x').on('click', 'a', function(e){


    //e.delegateTarget is the parent ul of the clicked a tag
    //e.target.id is the clicked a tag

    alert(e.delegateTarget.id); 
    alert(e.target.id);

});​

HTML:

 <ul id='a' class="x">
      <li><a id='1' href="#">A</a></li>
      <li><a id='2' href="#">B</a></li>
      <li><a id='3' href="#">C</a></li>
 </ul>

 <ul id='b' class="x">
      <li><a id='11' href="#">1</a></li>
      <li><a id='21' href="#">2</a></li>
      <li><a id='31' href="#">3</a></li>
 </ul>​

In terms of performance, you are not binding the event on all the a tags. jQuery suggests this way.

Here is the fiddle.