Question

I’m using JavaScript with the jQuery library to manipulate image thumbnails contained in a unordered list. When the image is loaded it does one thing, when an error occurs it does something else. I’m using jQuery load() and error() methods as events. After these events I check the image DOM element for the .complete to make sure the image wasn’t already loaded before jQuery could register the events.

It works correctly except when an error occurs before jQuery can register the events. The only solution I can think of is to use the img onerror attribute to store a “flag” somewhere globally (or on the node it’s self) that says it failed so jQuery can check that “store/node” when checking .complete.

Anyone have a better solution?

Edit: Bolded main points and added extra detail below:
I’m checking if an image is complete (aka loaded) AFTER I add a load and error event on the image. That way, if the image was loaded before the events were registered, I will still know. If the image isn’t loaded after the events then the events will take care of it when it does. The problem with this is, I can easily check if an image is loaded already, but I can’t tell if an error occurred instead.

Answer 1

Another option is to trigger the onload and/or onerror events by creating an in memory image element and setting its src attribute to the original src attribute of the original image. Here’s an example of what I mean:

$("<img/>")
    .on('load', function() { console.log("image loaded correctly"); })
    .on('error', function() { console.log("error loading image"); })
    .attr("src", $(originalImage).attr("src"))
;