Question

I jsut checked the sample of jQuery UI that opens a dialog, it’s strange that the message needs to be written in HTML and read it by jQuery selector:

http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/

 <script>
 $(function() {
  $( "#dialog" ).dialog();
 });
 </script>



<div class="demo">

<div id="dialog" title="Basic dialog">
 <p>This is the default dialog which is useful for displaying information. The dialog window can be moved, resized and closed with the 'x' icon.</p>
</div>

What I want to do is quite simple, I want the dialog to display a string defined as a js variable, like this:

var cmd_str = "abcdefg";
$(cmd_str).dialog();

But this doesn’t seem to work well.

Answer 1

It cannot be just any string, it needs to be html.

var cmd_str = "<div>abcdefg</div>";
$(cmd_str).dialog();

or maby a cleaner version:

var cmd_str = "abcdefg";
$(cmd_str).wrap("<div></div>").dialog();

Further explanation:

$("abcdefg") would match a <abcdefg /> element as $("a") would match a <a /> element.

To destroy:

Easiest would be to save the jquery object used for the dialog in a variable like this.

var cmd_str = "abcdefg";
var $message = $(cmd_str).wrap("<div></div>").dialog();

function destroyMessage(){
    $message.dialog("destroy");
}