Question

I have a jQuery UI dialog box with a form. I would like to simulate a click on one of the dialog’s buttons so you don’t have to use the mouse or tab over to it. In other words, I want it to act like a regular GUI dialog box where simulates hitting the “OK” button.

I assume this might be a simple option with the dialog, but I can’t find it in the jQuery UI documentation. I could bind each form input with keyup() but didn’t know if there was a simpler/cleaner way. Thanks.

Answer 1

I don’t know if there’s an option in the jQuery UI widget, but you could simply bind the keypress event to the div that contains your dialog…

$('#DialogTag').keypress(function(e) {
    if (e.keyCode == $.ui.keyCode.ENTER) {
          //Close dialog and/or submit here...
    }
});

This’ll run no matter what element has the focus in your dialog, which may or may not be a good thing depending on what you want.

If you want to make this the default functionality, you can add this piece of code:

// jqueryui defaults
$.extend($.ui.dialog.prototype.options, { 
    create: function() {
        var $this = $(this);

        // focus first button and bind enter to it
        $this.parent().find('.ui-dialog-buttonpane button:first').focus();
        $this.keypress(function(e) {
            if( e.keyCode == $.ui.keyCode.ENTER ) {
                $this.parent().find('.ui-dialog-buttonpane button:first').click();
                return false;
            }
        });
    } 
});

Here’s a more detailed view of what it would look like:

$( "#dialog-form" ).dialog({
  buttons: { … },
  open: function() {
    $("#dialog-form").keypress(function(e) {
      if (e.keyCode == $.ui.keyCode.ENTER) {
        $(this).parent().find("button:eq(0)").trigger("click");
      }
    });
  };
});