Question

I’m trying to modify Brian Reindel’s Accessible News Slider plugin (sorry, it won’t let me link to it and also to my work location), to allow a visitor to fill in multiple copies of a form, sliding back and forth between them. I need for the visitor to be able to add and delete copies of the form from the list. I’ve modified one of his examples and created a little function to add an element to the list. However, no matter how many times I call the function, it only adds one element, and the plugin is not aware of it; I can see it in the DOM Inspector, but that’s it. What am I missing?

Answer 1

this is Brian. Since you’re already using jQuery and the plugin, you would gain a great deal by using the library to append elements to the DOM within your custom function. I wanted to give you some guidance, since this is probably more work than you were inititally expecting. Here are some hopefully helpful tips:

• The plugin calculates some wrapper
  element widths based upon the number
  of list items. If you add/remove list
  items, then you would need to modify
  the calculations that were made or
  else it won’t scroll properly. You’ll probably experience the same types of issues for the click events on the next/previous buttons.
• If you have events registered on
  elements that you add/remove from the
  DOM, then you will need to
  re-register those events, since when
  the elements are gone, so are the
  events that were “bound” to them. It
  doesn’t look like this is your
  problem though at this point.
• If you’re adding form elements to the
  DOM on the fly using the “Add” link,
  then the user’s cursor focus is no
  longer on the form elements, and the
  slider is no longer really
  accessible. As much as I love
  plugging my own plugin, it was meant
  mostly to demonstrate usable, custom styled accessible
  JavaScript, and I’m not sure it is
  flexible enough to do what you want
  without some rework.

If you have more specific questions about how to do certain things to get you started on the right track, let me know, and I would be happy to help. Depending on how much you plan to use jQuery on your projects (and I highly recommend that you use it), try out the book Learning jQuery.