Avoid dropdown menu close on click inside

Question

I have a Twitter Bootstrap dropdown menu. As all Twitter Bootstrap users know, the dropdown menu closes on click (even clicking inside it).

To avoid this, I can easily attach a click event handler on the dropdown menu and simply add the famous event.stopPropagation().

<ul class="nav navbar-nav">
  <li class="dropdown mega-dropdown">
    <a href="javascript:;" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">
      <i class="fa fa-list-alt"></i> Menu item 1
      <span class="fa fa-chevron-down pull-right"></span>
    </a>
    <ul class="dropdown-menu mega-dropdown-menu">
      <li>
        <div id="carousel" class="carousel slide" data-ride="carousel">
          <ol class="carousel-indicators">
            <li data-slide-to="0" data-target="#carousel"></li>
            <li class="active" data-slide-to="1" data-target="#carousel"></li>
          </ol>
          <div class="carousel-inner">
            <div class="item">
              <img alt="" class="img-rounded" src="img1.jpg">
            </div>
            <div class="item active">
              <img alt="" class="img-rounded" src="img2.jpg">
            </div>
          </div>
          <a data-slide="prev" role="button" href="#carousel" 
             class="left carousel-control">
            <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-left"></span>
          </a>
          <a data-slide="next" role="button" href="#carousel" 
             class="right carousel-control">
            <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-right"></span>
          </a>
        </div>
      </li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

This looks easy and a very common behavior, however, and since carousel-controls (as well as carousel indicators) event handlers are delegated to the document object, the click event on these elements (prev/next controls, ...) will be “ignored”.

$('ul.dropdown-menu.mega-dropdown-menu').on('click', function(event){
    // The event won't be propagated up to the document NODE and 
    // therefore delegated events won't be fired
    event.stopPropagation();
});

Relying on Twitter Bootstrap dropdown hide/hidden events is not a solution for the following reasons:

• The provided event object for both event handlers does not give reference to the clicked element
• I don't have control over the dropdown menu content so adding a flag class or attribute is not possible

This fiddle is the normal behavior and this fiddle is with event.stopPropagation() added.

Update

Thanks to Roman for his answer. I also found an answer that you can find below.

Answer 1

Removing the data attribute data-toggle="dropdown" and implementing the open/close of the dropdown can be a solution.

First by handling the click on the link to open/close the dropdown like this :

$('li.dropdown.mega-dropdown a').on('click', function (event) {
    $(this).parent().toggleClass('open');
});

and then listening the clicks outside of the dropdown to close it like this :

$('body').on('click', function (e) {
    if (!$('li.dropdown.mega-dropdown').is(e.target) 
        && $('li.dropdown.mega-dropdown').has(e.target).length === 0 
        && $('.open').has(e.target).length === 0
    ) {
        $('li.dropdown.mega-dropdown').removeClass('open');
    }
});

Here is the demo : http://jsfiddle.net/RomaLefrancois/hh81rhcm/2/