Question

I’m currently using popovers with Twitter Bootstrap, initiated like this:

$('.popup-marker').popover({
        html: true,
        trigger: 'manual'
    }).click(function(e) {
        $(this).popover('toggle');
        e.preventDefault();
    });

As you can see, they’re triggered manually, and clicking on .popup-marker (which is a div with a background image) toggles a popover. This works great, but I’d like to also be able to close the popover with a click anywhere else on the page (but not on the popover itself!).

I’ve tried a few different things, including the following, but with no results to show for it:

$('body').click(function(e) {
    $('.popup-marker').popover('hide');
});

How can I close the popover with a click anywhere else on the page, but not with a click onthe popover itself?

Answer 1

Presuming that only one popover can be visible at any time, you can use a set of flags to mark when there’s a popover visible, and only then hide them.

If you set the event listener on the document body, it will trigger when you click the element marked with ‘popup-marker’. So you’ll have to call stopPropagation() on the event object. And apply the same trick when clicking on the popover itself.

Below is a working JavaScript code that does this. It uses jQuery >= 1.7

jQuery(function() {
    var isVisible = false;

    var hideAllPopovers = function() {
       $('.popup-marker').each(function() {
            $(this).popover('hide');
        });  
    };

    $('.popup-marker').popover({
        html: true,
        trigger: 'manual'
    }).on('click', function(e) {
        // if any other popovers are visible, hide them
        if(isVisible) {
            hideAllPopovers();
        }

        $(this).popover('show');

        // handle clicking on the popover itself
        $('.popover').off('click').on('click', function(e) {
            e.stopPropagation(); // prevent event for bubbling up => will not get caught with document.onclick
        });

        isVisible = true;
        e.stopPropagation();
    });


    $(document).on('click', function(e) {
        hideAllPopovers();
        isVisible = false;
    });
});

http://jsfiddle.net/AFffL/539/

The only caveat is that you won’t be able to open 2 popovers at the same time. But I think that would be confusing for the user, anyway 🙂