Question

I have an expanding menu using jquery. It works well except for one thing: when the user navigates away from the page the menu collapses. I want the menu to stay open when the user clicks on any of the final < li > links. All of these links open the same page. Content on these pages is grabbed from a database and determined by the ?id=.

Here’s the code:

HTML:

 <ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="javascript:;">Products</a>
           <ul id="nav2">
        <li><a href="javascript:;">Domestic Market</a>
            <ul>
                <li><a href="index.php?page=Product&id=1">Link1</a></li>
                    <li><a href="index.php?page=Product&id=2">Link2</a></li>
                    <li><a href="index.php?page=Product&id=3">Link3</a></li>
        </ul>
       </li>
       <li><a href="javascript:;">Commercial Market</a>
            <ul>
                <li><a href="">Coming Soon</a></li>
            </ul>
       </li>
      </ul>
       </li>
       </ul>

CSS:

ul {
    padding: 0px;
    margin: 0px;
    width: 10em;
        list-style-type:none;

}
li {
     font: 100% Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
 font-size:12px;
 color:#003;  
}

li ul {
    display: none;
}
li.active > ul {
    display: block;
}

jQuery:

$('#nav').delegate('li,a', 'click', function(e) {
    e.stopPropagation();

    var self = $(e.target),
        //get a reference to the clicked element
        active = self.parents().andSelf() //select all li's that should be active
        .addClass('active'); //and activate them
    $('#nav .active').not(active).removeClass('active'); //deactivate others  
});

$(document).click(function(){
    $('.active').removeClass('active'); 
});

How do I keep the final < li >’s open?

Answer 1

I would recommend storing the value in a cookie and then setting it on page load.

First off, I’d recommen you download the jQuery cookie plugin here.
It’s a good plugin and it’s small. Set the value:

$.cookie("cookie_name", "cookie_value");

And then on document.ready you can pull the value:

$.cookie("cookie_name);

and set it appropriately with something resembling your current click function.