Twitter Bootstrap alert message close and open again

Question

I have a problem with alert messages. It is displayed normally, and I can close it when the user presses x (close), but when the user tries to display it again (for example, click on the button event) then it is not shown. (Moreover, if I print this alert message to console, it is equal to [].) My code is here:

 <div class="alert" style="display: none">
   <a class="close" data-dismiss="alert">×</a>
   <strong>Warning!</strong> Best check yo self, you're not looking too good.
 </div>

And event:

 $(".alert").show();

P.S! I need to show alert message only after some event happened (for example, button clicked). Or what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Data-dismiss completely removes the element. Use jQuery's .hide() method instead.

The fix-it-quick method:

Using inline javascript to hide the element onclick like this:

<div class="alert" style="display: none"> 
    <a class="close" onclick="$('.alert').hide()">×</a>  
    <strong>Warning!</strong> Best check yo self, you're not looking too good.  
</div>

<a href="#" onclick="$('alert').show()">show</a>

http://jsfiddle.net/cQNFL/

This should however only be used if you are lazy (which is no good thing if you want an maintainable app).

The do-it-right method:

Create a new data attribute for hiding an element.

Javascript:

$(function(){
    $("[data-hide]").on("click", function(){
        $("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()
        // -or-, see below
        // $(this).closest("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()
    })
})

and then change data-dismiss to data-hide in the markup. Example at jsfiddle.

$("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()

This will hide all elements with the class specified in data-hide, i.e: data-hide="alert" will hide all elements with the alert class.

Xeon06 provided an alternative solution:

$(this).closest("." + $(this).attr("data-hide")).hide()

This will only hide the closest parent element. This is very useful if you don't want to give each alert a unique class. Please note that, however, you need to place the close button within the alert.

Definition of .closest from jquery doc:

For each element in the set, get the first element that matches the selector by testing the element itself and traversing up through its ancestors in the DOM tree.