Jquery selector not working when element contains

Question

I have just started using jquery for the first time so i'm not sure if what i'm doing is correct. What i'm trying to do is very basic, I have a script which is adding a css watermark to textboxes upon load in an MVC view.

To select the element i do the following:

jQuery(document).ready(function(){$('#Department.DeptName').addWatermark('input-watermarked', 'test');});

Then in my script for adding the css watermarkclass it fails at the "this.val().length" statement.

jQuery.fn.toggleWatermark = function(watermarkedClass, watermarkText) {
if (this.hasClass(watermarkedClass)) {
    this.removeWatermark(watermarkedClass);
}
else if (this.val().length == 0) {
    this.addClass(watermarkedClass);
    this.val(watermarkText);
}

}

The script works fine where an element id is "DepartmentDeptName", it's as if the selector doesn't work when the element id contains a dot inside it. Does anyone know why or how to get around this issue?

Answer 1

You are trying to access the #Department with a class DeptName. You should escape with two backslashes (as Joril said).

See JQuery Selectors for more info.

Answer 2

I think you should escape the dot with a double-backslash: $("#Department\\.DeptName") See here.

Answer 3

Alternative syntaxes like $("input[name='department.deptname']") will work if you have control over writing jQuery. I am using Spring MVC with Kendo and thus I don't have access to jQuery code. Spring MVC <form> tag automatically puts . whereever applicable. E.g. if the user has Address.. thus field city will become user.address.city (or address.city). And if I break spring MVC into multiple forms then it messes up my back-end logic. It also scatters what should have been a single form. Another alternative is to flatten the User object on the back-end... again, not very clean. I am not sure but Dojo worked in such a scenario.