Question

Possible Duplicate:
jQuery .data() Not Updating DOM

I am having a problem with using the on attribute. I have written a small set of methods to send api calls.

The markup is like this:

<div data-global-id="1318" data-action="unfollow" class="action text-as-link follow-btn btn" style="text-decoration: none;">unfollow</div>

and have an event capture like this:

$(document).on('click','.action', function(){
  var t={};
  t.args={};
  t.args.global_id=$(this).data('global-id');
  t.global_id=t.args.global_id;
  t.action=$(this).data('action');
  t.identifier=t.action + '_v2';
  alert('here is action: ' + t.action);
  api_post_v1(t);
});

The api_post_v1 correctly sends the call.

There is some code to handle the callback and it sets the markup to:

<div data-global-id="1318" data-action="follow" class="action text-as-link follow-btn btn" style="text-decoration: none;">follow</div>

The code for this is like:

$foo=$('.action[data-action=unfollow][data-global-id='+global_id+']');
$foo.attr('data-action','follow');

The key piece is the data-action. I’d like the call to the event handler above to say it is ‘follow’ but it says it is still ‘unfollow’.

The sequence is the following:

1. load page, the data-action=’unfollow’
2. click this, api call gets made and you are not following this user; the callback sets data-action=’follow’
3. click this value again and the data-action is echoed as ‘unfollow’ rather than ‘follow’

How could I tell jQuery to refresh the bindings of this event? I thought this was what $(document).on does.

thx

Answer 1

The data-* attributes & jQuery’s .data() method are not interchangeable. Use this to get it:

t.action = $(this).attr('data-action');

---

You seem to be mixing jQuery’s data method with HTML5’s data-* attributes. These are two different things. The only time they interact with one another is when you first call .data on an element.

When you make a call to .data, jQuery looks for any data-* attributes, and adds it to the data collection. However, this only happens once. Subsequent calls to .data will not look at the element’s data-* attributes.

To quote the jQuery docs:

The data- attributes are pulled in the first time the data property is accessed and then are no longer accessed or mutated (all data values are then stored internally in jQuery).

---

Since you’re using .attr('data-action', 'follow') to set it, you should use .attr('data-action') to get it.

Note: $('.action[data-action=unfollow]') will not select an element that had the action set via jQuery’s .data. Again, the two are not interchangeable.