Question

I want to use jQuery’s great live functionality for a mouseenter event, but it’s currently unsupported. Below is my first go at a solution, but it doesn’t seem optimal. Suggestions? Improvements?

// mouseenter emulation
jQuery('.selector').live('mouseover',function (e) {
    // live sees all mouseover events within the selector
    // only concerned about events where the selector is the target
    if (this != e.target) return; 
    // examine relatedTarget's parents to see if target is a parent. 
    // if target is a parent, we're "leaving" not entering
    var entering = true;
    jQuery(e.relatedTarget).parents().each(function () {
            if (this == e.target) {
                entering = false;
                return false; // found; stop searching
            }
    });
    if (!entering) return;
    /*
     the rest of my code 
     */
});

I can’t check target’s children for relatedTarget b/c there’s not an easy way to get all child nodes.
I can’t check directly if target’s parents have relatedTarget as a parent and thus “entering” target, b/c for mouseover, it could be entering from an adjacent sibling and not a parent.

This solution works ok. I’ve tested it, and it seems fine, but how could I improve it? It also suffers from how the DOM is laid out. Some part of the selector elements must be exposed to see the mouseover event, but that’s rarely a problem in the examples that I’m trying this on. Still, if there’s a way to guarantee that it will be seen, that would be nice.

I guess I want to know if I’m approaching this right, and if not, what’s better?

Answer 1

It’s been a while now with no takers, so I’m assuming there’s nothing better.

I’m using this in a couple projects now, so I’ll take it out of the unanswered questions pile.

Hope others find it useful, and if you find a bug or come up with something better, let me know.