jQuery $(document).ready and UpdatePanels?

Question

I'm using jQuery to wire up some mouseover effects on elements that are inside an UpdatePanel. The events are bound in $(document).ready . For example:

$(function() {    
    $('div._Foo').bind("mouseover", function(e) {
        // Do something exciting
    });    
});

Of course, this works fine the first time the page is loaded, but when the UpdatePanel does a partial page update, it's not run and the mouseover effects don't work any more inside the UpdatePanel.

What's the recommended approach for wiring stuff up in jQuery not only on the first page load, but every time an UpdatePanel fires a partial page update? Should I be using the ASP.NET ajax lifecycle instead of $(document).ready?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and found the way that worked best was to rely on Event Bubbling and event delegation to handle it. The nice thing about event delegation is that once setup, you don't have to rebind events after an AJAX update.

What I do in my code is setup a delegate on the parent element of the update panel. This parent element is not replaced on an update and therefore the event binding is unaffected.

There are a number of good articles and plugins to handle event delegation in jQuery and the feature will likely be baked into the 1.3 release. The article/plugin I use for reference is:

http://www.danwebb.net/2008/2/8/event-delegation-made-easy-in-jquery

Once you understand what it happening, I think you'll find this a much more elegant solution that is more reliable than remembering to re-bind events after every update. This also has the added benefit of giving you one event to unbind when the page is unloaded.

Answer 2

An UpdatePanel completely replaces the contents of the update panel on an update. This means that those events you subscribed to are no longer subscribed because there are new elements in that update panel.

What I've done to work around this is re-subscribe to the events I need after every update. I use $(document).ready() for the initial load, then use Microsoft's PageRequestManager (available if you have an update panel on your page) to re-subscribe every update.

$(document).ready(function() {
    // bind your jQuery events here initially
});

var prm = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance();

prm.add_endRequest(function() {
    // re-bind your jQuery events here
});

The PageRequestManager is a javascript object which is automatically available if an update panel is on the page. You shouldn't need to do anything other than the code above in order to use it as long as the UpdatePanel is on the page.

If you need more detailed control, this event passes arguments similar to how .NET events are passed arguments (sender, eventArgs) so you can see what raised the event and only re-bind if needed.

Here is the latest version of the documentation from Microsoft: msdn.microsoft.com/.../bb383810.aspx

---

A better option you may have, depending on your needs, is to use jQuery's .on(). These method are more efficient than re-subscribing to DOM elements on every update. Read all of the documentation before you use this approach however, since it may or may not meet your needs. There are a lot of jQuery plugins that would be unreasonable to refactor to use .delegate() or .on(), so in those cases, you're better off re-subscribing.

Answer 3

<script type="text/javascript">

        function BindEvents() {
            $(document).ready(function() {
                $(".tr-base").mouseover(function() {
                    $(this).toggleClass("trHover");
                }).mouseout(function() {
                    $(this).removeClass("trHover");
                });
         }
</script>

The area which is going to be updated.

<asp:UpdatePanel...
<ContentTemplate
     <script type="text/javascript">
                    Sys.Application.add_load(BindEvents);
     </script>
 *// Staff*
</ContentTemplate>
    </asp:UpdatePanel>

Answer 4

This worked for me:

$(document).ready(function() {

    // Do something exciting

    var prm = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance();

    prm.add_endRequest(function() {
        // re-bind your jQuery events here
    });

});

Answer 5

Update Panel always replaces your Jquery with its inbuilt Scriptmanager's scripts after every load. Its better if you use pageRequestManager's instance methods like this...

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_endRequest(onEndRequest)
    function onEndRequest(sender, args) {
       // your jquery code here
      });

it will work fine ...

Answer 6

My answer is based on all the expert comments above, but below is the following code that anyone can use to make sure on each postback and on each asynchronous postback the JavaScript code will still be executed.

In my case, I had a user control within a page. Just paste the below code in your user control.

<script type="text/javascript"> 
        var prm = Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance();
    prm.add_endRequest(EndRequestHandler);
    function EndRequestHandler(sender, args) {
        if (args.get_error() == undefined) {
            UPDATEPANELFUNCTION();
        }                   
    }

    function UPDATEPANELFUNCTION() {
        jQuery(document).ready(function ($) {
            /* Insert all your jQuery events and function calls */
        });
    }

    UPDATEPANELFUNCTION(); 

</script>