I’ve found variants of this problem on Stack Overflow but nothing my matches my

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Asked: June 7, 20262026-06-07T08:25:47+00:00 2026-06-07T08:25:47+00:00

I’ve found variants of this problem on Stack Overflow but nothing my matches my

0

I’ve found variants of this problem on Stack Overflow but nothing my matches my specific circumstance. Hopefully someone has some insight.

Right now I’m working on a web application where there is a button (technically an anchor tag) that spawns a list of items when pressed. The issue is, if the user presses this button rapidly twice in a row, the list will be spawned twice– the button is meant to clear the list before spawning it to prevent duplication, but something about the way the scripts interact is causing this bug. The button spawns the list by making an ajax call to a server.

Now, I’ve tried fixing this bug by flipping a boolean value to 1 when the button is pressed, and making the button do nothing until it is 0 again. This seems not to work regardless of where in the code I set the value to 0 again: I’ve tried putting it at the end of the ajaxGet function, as well as after page load, but neither solution works.

Ideally, I would like a way for the button to become enabled as soon as the page is completely finished loading and rendering. Ultimately, what’s needed is a way of preventing the user from pressing the button twice in a row. I’ve considered using a timer for this, but I’d prefer not to have to resort to that.

Any ideas? Let me know if you would like code snippets.

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EDIT: Thanks everyone for your answers! I used a variant of Fibrewire’s answer to solve the problem, and it works great. At the beginning of the method that the button calls, I put the following code:

if (actionsDisabled == 1) {
    return;
}//if
else {
    actionsDisabled = 1;
    setTimeout("actionsDisabled=0;", 1000);
}//else

Where actionsDisabled is a global boolean. It might not be as airtight as it could be (in particular, you’d hit a problem if the list took more than a second to load), but it’s elegant and functional, and has the added bonus of reducing server requests (if traffic ever became a problem, you could restrict calls to once every 5 or 10 seconds or whatever). Thanks again!