Question

I’ve got a sub-nav that works using jquery – A user clicks on the top level list item, for instance ‘services’ which triggers the dropdown. The dropdown toggles via clicking the ‘service’ link. I’ve made it so a user can click anywhere on the screen to toggle the dropdown to a closed state. But as the site is responsive i want the user to be able to click (touch) anywhere on the screen to close the dropdown but my problem is that it’s not working on the touch devices.

My code ive setup for the document click is:

$(document).click(function(event) { 

  if ( $(".children").is(":visible")) {
    $("ul.children").slideUp('slow');
  }

});

I’m assuming document.click might not work on touch devices, and if not, what work-around is there to achieve the same effect?

Thanks

Answer 1

Update! In modern browsers, the click event will be fired for a tap, so you don’t need to add extra touchstart or touchend events as click should suffice.

This previous answer worked for a time with browsers that thought a tap was special. It originally included a "touch" event that actually was never standardised.

Unless you have a problem with:

$(document).on('click', function () { ... });

There is no need to change anything!

Previous information, updated to remove touch…

To trigger the function with click or touch, you could change this:

$(document).click( function () {

To this:

$(document).on('click touchstart', function () {

The touchstart event fires as soon as an element is touched, so it may be more appropriate to use touchend depending on your circumstances.