Question

I have a small jquery snippet that displays notification message at the top of the screen in response to user actions on a page. The notification is often displayed after Ajax actions with dynamic content inside it.

For example:

$("#mini-txt").html("Thank you!");
$("#mini").fadeIn("fast");
setTimeout(function() {$("#mini").animate({height: "hide", opacity: "hide"}, "medium");}, 3000);

The notification works well, except when a user does two or more actions in rapid succession, in which case the TimeOut function will confuse itself and the second message appears to come inside the previous 3000 milliseconds.

Is there a way to “kill” the previous notification if a new action is performed. I’ve got no problem with the actions/selectors, just the TimeOut function…. either stopping it or overriding it somehow. Or perhaps there’s a better alternative for getting the message to linger on the screen for a few seconds before disappearing?

Thank you.

Answer 1

First, you store the return value for the setTimeout function:

// Set the timeout
var timeout = setTimeout(function()
    {
        // Your function here
    }, 2000);

Then, when you’re ready to kill the timeout…you just call clearTimeout with the stored value from the previous call to setTimeout.

// Then clearn the timeout
clearTimeout(timeout);