Question

I have a problem with events on IE8 (dread!), using dojo toolkit 1.4.3 (can’t use any other version) on a Spring application running on Websphere Portal Server.

Now, I don’t believe the backend has anything to do with this, since the problem with IE8 tabbing is known:

press on any field of a webpage and press tab all the way, the focus goes back up to the url input and buttons and doesn’t return to the document after repeating it, if you click on an element in a website it re-adds the focus to that element, but when you press tab again it goes back to the top of the browser.

Now, my problem happens AFTER tabbing all the way and getting the focus out of the document.
It would seem the browser is removing events from the DOM, I have debugged the code on IE8 and it seems to not trigger the callback function, while it behaves normally when not doing the whole tab thing.

I’ve tried using dojo.disconnect() and re-adding the events by subsequently calling dojo.connect() to no avail, here’s a small snippet:

var connectedObjects = {};
dojo.query(".someClass").forEach(function(inputField){
   connectedObjects[inputField.id] = {}; 
   connectedObjects[inputField.id].onfocus = dojo.connect(inputField, "onfocus", function(event){
       if(connectedObjects[inputField.id]){
           dojo.disconnect(connectedObjects[inputField.id].onkeyup);
           connectedObjects[inputField.id].onkeyup = dojo.connect(inputField, "onkeyup", someCallbackFunction);
       }
   })
});

Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve this?

Answer 1

so, this is a weird one, but there is a simple way to fix the problem, this also seems to fix other browsers from cycling through hidden input fields that have the css property display:none, so on to the code:

dojo.query("*").forEach(function(fieldID){
    dojo.attr(fieldID, "tabIndex", "-1");
});