jQuery: Get height of hidden element in jQuery

Question

I need to get height of an element that is within a div that is hidden. Right now I show the div, get the height, and hide the parent div. This seems a bit silly. Is there a

Answer 1

Here's a script I wrote to handle all of jQuery's dimension methods for hidden elements, even descendants of hidden parents. Note that, of course, there's a performance hit using this.

// Correctly calculate dimensions of hidden elements
(function($) {
    var originals = {},
        keys = [
            'width',
            'height',
            'innerWidth',
            'innerHeight',
            'outerWidth',
            'outerHeight',
            'offset',
            'scrollTop',
            'scrollLeft'
        ],
        isVisible = function(el) {
            el = $(el);
            el.data('hidden', []);

            var visible = true,
                parents = el.parents(),
                hiddenData = el.data('hidden');

            if(!el.is(':visible')) {
                visible = false;
                hiddenData[hiddenData.length] = el;
            }

            parents.each(function(i, parent) {
                parent = $(parent);
                if(!parent.is(':visible')) {
                    visible = false;
                    hiddenData[hiddenData.length] = parent;
                }
            });
            return visible;
        };

    $.each(keys, function(i, dimension) {
        originals[dimension] = $.fn[dimension];

        $.fn[dimension] = function(size) {
            var el = $(this[0]);

            if(
                (
                    size !== undefined &&
                    !(
                        (dimension == 'outerHeight' || 
                            dimension == 'outerWidth') &&
                        (size === true || size === false)
                    )
                ) ||
                isVisible(el)
            ) {
                return originals[dimension].call(this, size);
            }

            var hiddenData = el.data('hidden'),
                topHidden = hiddenData[hiddenData.length - 1],
                topHiddenClone = topHidden.clone(true),
                topHiddenDescendants = topHidden.find('*').andSelf(),
                topHiddenCloneDescendants = topHiddenClone.find('*').andSelf(),
                elIndex = topHiddenDescendants.index(el[0]),
                clone = topHiddenCloneDescendants[elIndex],
                ret;

            $.each(hiddenData, function(i, hidden) {
                var index = topHiddenDescendants.index(hidden);
                $(topHiddenCloneDescendants[index]).show();
            });
            topHidden.before(topHiddenClone);

            if(dimension == 'outerHeight' || dimension == 'outerWidth') {
                ret = $(clone)[dimension](size ? true : false);
            } else {
                ret = $(clone)[dimension]();
            }

            topHiddenClone.remove();
            return ret;
        };
    });
})(jQuery);