Question

I think I’ve been too much time looking at this function and just got stuck trying to figure out the nice clean way to do it.

It’s a jQuery function that adds a click event to any div that has a click CSS class. When that div.click is clicked it redirects the user to the first link found in it.

function clickabledivs() {
    $('.click').each(
        function (intIndex) {
            $(this).bind("click", function(){
                window.location = $( "#"+$(this).attr('id')+" a:first-child" ).attr('href');
            });
        }
    );
}

The code simply works although I’m pretty sure there is a fairly better way to accomplish it, specially the selector I am using: $( "#"+$(this).attr('id')+" a:first-child" ). Everything looks long and slow. Any ideas?

Please let me know if you need more details.

PS: I’ve found some really nice jQuery benchmarking reference from Project2k.de here:
http://blog.projekt2k.de/2010/01/benchmarking-jquery-1-4/

Answer 1

Depending on how many of these div.click elements you have, you may want to use event delegation to handle these clicks. This means using a single event handler for all divs that have the click class. Then, inside that event handler, your callback acts based on which div.click the event originated from. Like this:

$('#div-click-parent').click(function (event)
{
    var $target = $(event.target); // the element that fired the original click event
    if ($target.is('div.click'))
    {
        window.location.href = $target.find('a').attr('href');
    }
});

Fewer event handlers means better scaling – more div.click elements won’t slow down your event handling.