What is DOM Event delegation?

Question

Can anyone please explain event delegation in JavaScript and how is it useful?

Answer 1

dom event delegation is something different from the computer science definition.

It refers to handling bubbling events from many elements, like table cells, from a parent object, like the table. It can keep the code simpler, especially when adding or removing elements, and saves some memory.

Answer 2

Delegation is a technique where an object expresses certain behavior to the outside but in reality delegates responsibility for implementing that behaviour to an associated object. This sounds at first very similar to the proxy pattern, but it serves a much different purpose. Delegation is an abstraction mechanism which centralizes object (method) behavior.

Generally spoken: use delegation as alternative to inheritance. Inheritance is a good strategy, when a close relationship exist in between parent and child object, however, inheritance couples objects very closely. Often, delegation is the more flexible way to express a relationship between classes.

This pattern is also known as "proxy chains". Several other design patterns use delegation - the State, Strategy and Visitor Patterns depend on it.

Answer 3

It's basically how association is made to the element. .click applies to the current DOM, while .on (using delegation) will continue to be valid for new elements added to the DOM after event association.

Which is better to use, I'd say it depends on the case.

Example:

<ul id="todo">
   <li>Do 1</li>
   <li>Do 2</li>
   <li>Do 3</li>
   <li>Do 4</li>
</ul>

.Click Event:

$("li").click(function () {
   $(this).remove ();
});

Event .on:

$("#todo").on("click", "li", function () {
   $(this).remove();
});

Note that I've separated the selector in the .on. I'll explain why.

Let us suppose that after this association, let us do the following:

$("#todo").append("<li>Do 5</li>");

That is where you will notice the difference.

If the event was associated via .click, task 5 will not obey the click event, and so it will not be removed.

If it was associated via .on, with the selector separate, it will obey.

Answer 4

The delegation concept

If there are many elements inside one parent, and you want to handle events on them of them - don’t bind handlers to each element. Instead, bind the single handler to their parent, and get the child from event.target. This site provides useful info about how to implement event delegation. http://javascript.info/tutorial/event-delegation

Answer 5

A delegate in C# is similar to a function pointer in C or C++. Using a delegate allows the programmer to encapsulate a reference to a method inside a delegate object. The delegate object can then be passed to code which can call the referenced method, without having to know at compile time which method will be invoked.

See this link --> http://www.akadia.com/services/dotnet_delegates_and_events.html

Answer 6

DOM event delegation is a mechanism of responding to ui-events via a single common parent rather than each child, through the magic of event "bubbling" (aka event propagation).

When an event is triggered on an element, the following occurs:

The event is dispatched to its target EventTarget and any event listeners found there are triggered. Bubbling events will then trigger any additional event listeners found by following the EventTarget's parent chain upward, checking for any event listeners registered on each successive EventTarget. This upward propagation will continue up to and including the Document.

Event bubbling provides the foundation for event delegation in browsers. Now you can bind an event handler to a single parent element, and that handler will get executed whenever the event occurs on any of its child nodes (and any of their children in turn). This is event delegation. Here's an example of it in practice:

<ul onclick="alert(event.type + '!')">
    <li>One</li>
    <li>Two</li>
    <li>Three</li>
</ul>

With that example if you were to click on any of the child <li> nodes, you would see an alert of "click!", even though there is no click handler bound to the <li> you clicked on. If we bound onclick="..." to each <li> you would get the same effect.

So what's the benefit?

Imagine you now have a need to dynamically add new <li> items to the above list via DOM manipulation:

var newLi = document.createElement('li');
newLi.innerHTML = 'Four';
myUL.appendChild(newLi);

Without using event delegation you would have to "rebind" the "onclick" event handler to the new <li> element, in order for it to act the same way as its siblings. With event delegation you don't need to do anything. Just add the new <li> to the list and you're done.

This is absolutely fantastic for web apps with event handlers bound to many elements, where new elements are dynamically created and/or removed in the DOM. With event delegation the number of event bindings can be drastically decreased by moving them to a common parent element, and code that dynamically creates new elements on the fly can be decoupled from the logic of binding their event handlers.

Another benefit to event delegation is that the total memory footprint used by event listeners goes down (since the number of event bindings go down). It may not make much of a difference to small pages that unload often (i.e. user's navigate to different pages often). But for long-lived applications it can be significant. There are some really difficult-to-track-down situations when elements removed from the DOM still claim memory (i.e. they leak), and often this leaked memory is tied to an event binding. With event delegation you're free to destroy child elements without risk of forgetting to "unbind" their event listeners (since the listener is on the ancestor). These types of memory leaks can then be contained (if not eliminated, which is freaking hard to do sometimes. IE I'm looking at you).

Here are some better concrete code examples of event delegation:

• How JavaScript Event Delegation Works
• Event Delegation versus Event Handling
• jQuery.delegate is event delegation + selector specification
• jQuery.on uses event delegation when passed a selector as the 2nd parameter
• Event delegation without a JavaScript library
• Closures vs Event delegation: takes a look at the pros of not converting code to use event delegation
• Interesting approach PPK uncovered for delegating the focus and blur events (which do not bubble)