Question

I have the following code It takes a <ul> and it drops down the contents when clicked. That works great. The problem was that it would also close other menus of the same type when a child <li> was clicked.

I ‘fixed’ this problem by using the if clause to determine if the item being clicked was also the item that was currently open, but I want to take it a step further and make it so that if the parent ul is clicked again, it will close the menu. I am having a great deal of misunderstanding as to how to approach this. I attempted to stop the propagation of the children elements, but it yields the same results. Can anyone assist?

wiring (document load)

$(document).ready(function () {
                $('[data-role="sidebar-dropdown"]').drawer({
                    open: 'sidebar-dropdown-open',
                    css: '.sidebar-dropdown-open'
                });
        });

html

<ul>
    <li class=" dropdown" data-role="sidebar-dropdown">
        <a href="pages/.." class="remote">Link Text</a>
        <ul class="sub-menu light sidebar-dropdown-menu">
            <li><a class="remote" href="pages/...">Link Text</a></li>
            <li><a class="remote" href="pages/...">Link Text</a></li>
            <li><a class="remote" href="pages/...">Link Text</a></li>
        </ul>
    </li>
</ul>

JavaScript

(function ($) {
    $.fn.drawer = function (options) {
        // Create some defaults, extending them with any options that were provided
        var settings = $.extend({
            open: 'open',
            css: '.open'
        }, options);

        return this.each(function () {
            $(this).on('click', function (e) {
                // slide up all open dropdown menus
                $(settings.css).not($(this)).each(function () {
                    $(this).removeClass(settings.open);
                    // retrieve the appropriate menu item
                    var $menu = $(this).children(".dropdown-menu, .sidebar-dropdown-menu");
                    // slide down the one clicked on.
                    $menu.slideUp('fast');
                    $menu.removeClass('active');
                });


                // mark this menu as open
                $(this).addClass(settings.open);

                // retrieve the appropriate menu item
                var $menu = $(this).children(".dropdown-menu, .sidebar-dropdown-menu");
                // slide down the one clicked on.
                $menu.slideDown(100);
                $menu.addClass('active');
                e.preventDefault();
                e.stopPropagation();
                
            }).on("mouseleave", function () {
                $(this).children(".dropdown-menu").hide().delay(300);
            });

        })
    };

})(jQuery);

Answer 1

In jQuery events you can read the node which initiated the event by referencing e.target.

if ($(e.target).is("li")) { // do something only if the clicked element was a li }

Regarding closing elements which are not children, instead of doing a global selector $(selector) you should instead do a selector relative to your initiating dom node. It’s a common practice to pass this and stashing it inside your jQuery plugin.

return this.each(function(this)) { var $node = $(this); }

Then all lookups would be done like

$node.find(selector).doStuff()