Question

My question is. I’ve a barcode-scanner on my website in order to verify if a student is in classroom. The INPUT element of my form must always have focus in order to recieve the code from the barcode-scanner.

My code is:

    $("#codebarre").focus()
    $("body").click(function(){
        $("#codebarre").focus()      
})

The second entry in order to recover the focus if i click on the page. My problem is: i have the possibility to write a comment in another input in the page. With my code, it’s true that just after a click in my input, #codebar recover focus and i’m not able to write in my input. So my need is: always focus in #codebar except if i click (focus) in my remark INPUT.

I try this:

    $("#codebarre").focus()
    $("body").click(function(){
    if( !$(".remark").focus() ){
        $("#codebarre").focus()  
    }        
})

My code don’t work. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong ?

Answer 1

You can’t determine if a control has the focus in that manner. focus() will only set the focus to that control. See this answer for a detailed explanation of how to determine if a control has the focus: Using jQuery to test if an input has focus

If you are using jQuery 1.6, you should be able to do:

$("body").click(function(){
    if (!$(".remark").is(":focus")) {
        $("#codebarre").focus()  
    }

EDIT
If you are using an earlier version of jQuery, you can use $(document.activeElement) to determine which control has the focus. In that case, the code should be:

$("body").click(function(){
    if (!$(document.activeElement).hasClass("remark")) {
        $("#codebarre").focus()  
    }