jQuery - How can I temporarily disable the onclick event listener after the event has been fired?

Question

How can I temporarily disable the onclick event listener, (jQuery preferred), after the event has been fired?

Example:

After the user clicks on the button and fires this function below, I want to disabled the onclick listener, therefore not firing the same command to my django view.

$(".btnRemove").click(function(){
   $(this).attr("src", "/url/to/ajax-loader.gif");
   $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: "/url/to/django/view/to/remove/item/" + this.id,
        dataType: "json",
        success: function(returned_data){
            $.each(returned_data, function(i, item){
              // do stuff                       
     });
   }
});

Thanks a lot,

Aldo

Answer 1

There are a lot of ways to do it. For example:

$(".btnRemove").click(function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    if ($this.data("executing")) return;
    $this
        .data("executing", true)
        .attr("src", "/url/to/ajax-loader.gif");
    $.get("/url/to/django/view/to/remove/item/" + this.id, function(returnedData) {
        // ... do your stuff ...
        $this.removeData("executing");
    });
});

or

$(".btnRemove").click(handler);

function handler() {
    var $this = $(this)
        .off("click", handler)
        .attr("src", "/url/to/ajax-loader.gif");
    $.get("/url/to/django/view/to/remove/item/" + this.id, function(returnedData) {
        // ... do your stuff ...
        $this.click(handler);
    });
}

We can also use event delegation for clearer code and better performance:

$(document).on("click", ".btnRemove:not(.unclickable)", function() {
    var $this = $(this)
        .addClass("unclickable")
        .attr("src", "/url/to/ajax-loader.gif");
    $.get("/url/to/django/view/to/remove/item/" + this.id, function(returnedData) {
        // ... do your stuff ...
        $this.removeClass("unclickable");
    });
});

If we don't need to re-enable the handler after it has been executed, then we can use the .one() method. It binds handlers that are to be executed only once. See jQuery docs: http://api.jquery.com/one