Detect added element to DOM with Mutation Observer

Lukas picture Lukas · Dec 6, 2013 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

I'm adding some element to DOM after drag event. I need to detect this element and the moment when this element was added. I use Mutation Observer but something is wrong, the code:

var targetNodes = $('.mvly');
var MutationObserver = window.MutationObserver || window.WebKitMutationObserver;
var myObserver = new MutationObserver (mutationHandler);
var obsConfig = { childList: true, characterData: true, attributes: true, subtree: true };

targetNodes.each(function(){
    myObserver.observe(this, obsConfig);
} );

function mutationHandler (mutationRecords) {
    mutationRecords.forEach ( function (mutation) {
        if (typeof mutation.addedNodes == "object") {
            console.log('test');
        }
    });
}

Can anybody help, much thx.

Answer

Elliot B. picture Elliot B. · Jul 23, 2017

Here's a simple example of how you can use a MutationObserver to listen for when an element is added to the DOM.

For brevity, I'm using jQuery syntax to build the node and insert it into the DOM.

var myElement = $("<div>hello world</div>")[0];

var observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutations) {
   if (document.contains(myElement)) {
        console.log("It's in the DOM!");
        observer.disconnect();
    }
});

observer.observe(document, {attributes: false, childList: true, characterData: false, subtree:true});

$("body").append(myElement); // console.log: It's in the DOM!

You don't need to iterate over each MutationRecord stored in mutations because you can perform the document.contains check directly upon myElement.