Question

so i implemented a bit of jQuery that basically toggles content via a slider that was activated by an <a> tag. now thinking about it id rather have the DIV thats holding the link be the link its self.

the jQuery that i am using is sitting in my head looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
function slideonlyone(thechosenone) {
 $('.systems_detail').each(function(index) {
      if ($(this).attr("id") == thechosenone) {
           $(this).slideDown(200);
      }
      else {
           $(this).slideUp(600);
      }
 });
}
</script>

i was using this as a index type box so there are several products when you click on the <a> tag that used to be an image* it would render a bit of content beneath it describing the products details:

<div class="system_box">
  <h2>BEE Scorecard database</h2>
  <p>________________</p>
  <a href="javascript:slideonlyone('sms_box');"></a>
</div>

the products details are wrapped in this div.

<div class="systems_detail" id="sms_box">
</div>

so when you click on what used to be a image* it would run the slideonlyone(‘div_id_name’) function. the function above then first closes all the other divs with the class name ‘system details’ and then opens/slides the div with the id that was passed into the slideonlyone function. that way you can toggle products details and not have them all showing at once.

note i only kept the <a> tag to show you what was in there i will be getting rid of it.

note: i had an idea of just wrapping the whole div in an <a> tag but is that good practice?

So now what i am wondering is since you need JavaScript to run onclick on a div tag how do you write it so that it still runs my slideonlyone function?

Answer 1

Using obtrusive JavaScript (i.e. inline code) as in your example, you can attach the click event handler to the div element with the onclick attribute like so:

 <div id="some-id" class="some-class" onclick="slideonlyone('sms_box');">
     ...
 </div>

However, the best practice is unobtrusive JavaScript which you can easily achieve by using jQuery’s on() method or its shorthand click(). For example:

 $(document).ready( function() {
     $('.some-class').on('click', slideonlyone('sms_box'));
     // OR //
     $('.some-class').click(slideonlyone('sms_box'));
 });

Inside your handler function (e.g. slideonlyone() in this case) you can reference the element that triggered the event (e.g. the div in this case) with the $(this) object. For example, if you need its ID, you can access it with $(this).attr('id').

---

EDIT

After reading your comment to @fmsf below, I see you also need to dynamically reference the target element to be toggled. As @fmsf suggests, you can add this information to the div with a data-attribute like so:

<div id="some-id" class="some-class" data-target="sms_box">
    ...
</div>

To access the element’s data-attribute you can use the attr() method as in @fmsf’s example, but the best practice is to use jQuery’s data() method like so:

 function slideonlyone() {
     var trigger_id = $(this).attr('id'); // This would be 'some-id' in our example
     var target_id  = $(this).data('target'); // This would be 'sms_box'
     ...
 }

Note how data-target is accessed with data('target'), without the data- prefix. Using data-attributes you can attach all sorts of information to an element and jQuery would automatically add them to the element’s data object.