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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T17:00:12+00:00

I want to bind an onclick event to an element I insert dynamically with

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I want to bind an onclick event to an element I insert dynamically with jQuery

But It never runs the binded function. I’d be happy if you can point out why this example is not working and how I can get it to run properly:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"        
            "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
        <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="da" lang="da">
        <head>
          <title>test of click binding</title>

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.4.min.js"></script>
          <script type="text/javascript">


        jQuery(function(){
          close_link = $('<a class="" href="#">Click here to see an alert</a>');
          close_link.bind("click", function(){
            alert('hello from binded function call');
            //do stuff here...
          });
  
          $('.add_to_this').append(close_link);
        });
          </script>
        </head>
        <body>
          <h1 >Test of click binding</h1>
          <p>problem: to bind a click event to an element I append via JQuery.</p>

          <div class="add_to_this">
            <p>The link is created, then added here below:</p>
          </div>

          <div class="add_to_this">
            <p>Another is added here below:</p>
          </div>


        </body>
        </html>

EDIT: I edited the example to contain two elements the method is inserted to. In that case, the alert() call is never executed. (thanks to @Daff for pointing that out in a comment)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The first problem is that when you call append on a jQuery set with more than one element, a clone of the element to append is created for each and thus the attached event observer is lost.

    An alternative way to do it would be to create the link for each element:

    function handler() { alert('hello'); }
$('.add_to_this').append(function() {
  return $('<a>Click here</a>').click(handler);
})

    Another potential problem might be that the event observer is attached before the element has been added to the DOM. I’m not sure if this has anything to say, but I think the behavior might be considered undetermined.
    A more solid approach would probably be:

    function handler() { alert('hello'); }
$('.add_to_this').each(function() {
  var link = $('<a>Click here</a>');
  $(this).append(link);
  link.click(handler);
});
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