jQuery doesn't work after content is loaded via AJAX

Question

On this page I have a jQuery popup window and thumbnail resizable images. If I mouse over on the thumbnails, the images are resizing perfectly. Also, when I click on the big

Answer 1

jQuery selectors select matching elements that exist in the DOM when the code is executed, and don't dynamically update. When you call a function, such as .hover() to add event handler(s), it only adds them to those elements. When you do an AJAX call, and replace a section of your page, you're removing those elements with the event handlers bound to them and replacing them with new elements. Even if those elements would now match that selector they don't get the event handler bound because the code to do that has already executed.

Event handlers

Specifically for event handlers (i.e. .click()) you can use event delegation to get around this. The basic principle is that you bind an event handler to a static (exists when the page loads, doesn't ever get replaced) element which will contain all of your dynamic (AJAX loaded) content. You can read more about event delegation in the jQuery documentation.

For your click event handler, the updated code would look like this:

$(document).on('click', "#click", function () {
    $('#click').css({
        "background-color": "#f00",
        "color": "#fff",
        "cursor": "inherit"
    }).text("Open this window again and this message will still be here.");
    return false;
});

That would bind an event handler to the entire document (so will never get removed until the page unloads), which will react to click events on an element with the id property of click. Ideally you'd use something closer to your dynamic elements in the DOM (perhaps a <div> on your page that is always there and contains all of your page content), since that will improve the efficiency a bit.

The issue comes when you need to handle .hover(), though. There's no actual hover event in JavaScript, jQuery just provides that function as a convenient shorthand for binding event handlers to the mouseenter and mouseleave events. You can, however, use event delegation:

$(document).on({
    mouseenter: function () {
        $(this).stop().animate({
            width: xwidth * 3,
            height: xheight * 3,
            margin: -(xwidth / 3)
        }, 200); //END FUNCTION

        $(this).addClass('image-popout-shadow');
    },
    mouseleave: function () {
        $(this).stop().animate({
            width: xwidth,
            height: xheight,
            margin: 0
        }, 200, function () {
            $(this).removeClass('image-popout-shadow');
        }); //END FUNCTION

    }
}, '.image-popout img');

---

jQuery plugins

That covers the event handler bindings. However, that's not all you're doing. You also initialise a jQuery plugin (colorbox), and there's no way to delegate those to elements. You're going to have to simply call those lines again when you've loaded your AJAX content; the simplest way would be to move those into a separate named function that you can then call in both places (on page load and in your AJAX requests success callback):

function initialiseColorbox() {
    $(".iframe").colorbox({
        iframe: true,
        width: "1000px",
        height: "500px"
    });
    $(".inline").colorbox({
        inline: true,
        width: "50%"
    });
    $(".callbacks").colorbox({
        onOpen: function () {
            alert('onOpen: colorbox is about to open');
        },
        onLoad: function () {
            alert('onLoad: colorbox has started to load the targeted content');
        },
        onComplete: function () {
            alert('onComplete: colorbox has displayed the loaded content');
        },
        onCleanup: function () {
            alert('onCleanup: colorbox has begun the close process');
        },
        onClosed: function () {
            alert('onClosed: colorbox has completely closed');
        }
    });
}

Answer 2

Your event handlers are being lost when you replace the content. When you set you hover events, jQuery is setting them on the events on the page currently. So when you replace them with ajax, the events are not associated with those elements because they are new.

To fix this you can either call the function that binds them again or you can instead set the event handler on the document as in this answer using $(document).on

That way the event is set on the document and any new elements will get the event called.

Answer 3

I'm late to the party but I would combine two of the answers. What worked for my specific needs was to incorporate the ajaxstop within the complete

complete: function () {
     $( document ).ajaxStop(function() {
         //now that all have been added to the dom, you can put in some code for your needs.
         console.log($(".subareafilterActive").get().length)

     })
}