Question

Whats the use of live in jQuery? I mean when exactly do we use it.

I was trying to add an onclick event to an anchor tag, but it was not working. Then I used:

$('#Register').live('click', function (e) {
    $("#storytellerregistration").fadeIn("slow");
});

and this worked. When exactly should we use live function?

Answer 1

Quoting Docs:

(Emphasis mine)

Description: Attach an event handler for all elements which match the
current selector, now and in the future.

Notice the and in the future part, it refers to those elements that are not present but will be added in future.

So you use live() for those elements that you add dynamically/later in your page via JS/jQuery.

In conclusion, live() works for elements that are present when document was loaded and also those which are added later via JS/jQuery.

Let’s assume we create a div and attach it to body:

$('<div />').attr('id', 'mydiv').append('body');

Now since we added this element ourself later/afer page load, we will have to use live() for such element.

$('#mydiv').live('click', function(){ ... });

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Note: The live() is deprecated method and won’t work in future versions of jQuery. Start using on() method instead 🙂