Question

It appears that the Blur event stops the click event handler from working? I have a combo box where the options only appear when the text field has focus. Choosing an option link should cause an event to occur.

I have a fiddle example here: http://jsfiddle.net/uXq5p/6/

To reproduce:

1. Select the text box
2. Links appear
3. Click a link
4. The blur even occurs and the links disappear
5. Nothing else happens.

Expected behavior:

On step 5, after blur occurs, the click even should also then fire. How do I make that happen?

UPDATE:

After playing with this for a while, it seems that someone has gone to great lengths to prevent an already-occurred click event from being handled if a blur event makes the clicked element Un-clickable.

For example:

$('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('left','-20px');

works just fine, but

$('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('left','-2000px');

prevents the click event.

This appears to be a bug in Firefox, since making an element un-clickable should prevent future clicks, but not cancel ones that have already occurred when it could be clicked.

Other things that prevent the click event from processing:

$('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('z-index','-20');
$('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('display','none');
$('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('visibility','hidden');
$('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('opacity','.5');

I’ve found a few other questions on this site that are having similar problems. There seem to be two solutions floating around:

1. Use a delay. This is bad because it creates a race condition between the hiding and the click event handler. Its also sloppy.

2. Use the mousedown event. But this isn’t a great solution either since click is the correct event for a link. The behavior of mousedown is counter-intuitive from a UX perspective, particularly since you can’t cancel the click by moving the mouse off the element before releasing the button.

I can think of a few more.

3.Use mouseover and mouseout on the link to enable/disable the blur event for the field. This doesn’t work with keyboard tabing since the mouse is not involved.

4.The best solution would be something like:

$('#ShippingGroup').blur(function()
{
   if($(document.activeElement) == $('.ShippingGroupLinkList'))
      return; // The element that now has focus is a link, do nothing
   $('#ShippingGroupListWrapper').css('display','none'); // hide it.
}

Unfortunately, $(document.activeElement) seems to always return the body element, not the one that was clicked. But maybe if there was a reliable way to know either 1. which element now has focus or two, which element caused the blur (not which element is blurring) from within the blur handler. Also, is there any other event (besides mousedown) that fires before blur?

Answer 1

click event triggers after the blur so the link gets hidden. Instead of click use mousedown it will work.

$('.ShippingGroupLinkList').live("mousedown", function(e) {
    alert('You wont see me if your cursor was in the text box');
});

Other alternative is to have some delay before you hide the links on blur event. Its upto you which approach to go for.

Demo