Prevent onClick event when selecting text

Question

I've got this problem where I need to show and hide divs when clicking on a table cell. However, I also want people to be able to select text and copy it within the cell without hiding the information.

Totally open to changing the design if necessary. :)

Here's a fiddle which demonstrates the issue

http://jsfiddle.net/k61u66ek/1/

Here's the HTML code in the fiddle:

<table border=1>
    <tr>
        <td>
            Information
        </td>
        <td onClick="toggleInfo()">
            <div id="information" style="display:none">
                More information that I want to select without hiding
            </div>
            <div id="clicktoshow">
                Click to show info
            </div>

        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

Here's the javascript:

function toggleInfo() {
    $("#clicktoshow").toggle();
    $("#information").toggle();    
}

Any suggestion/advise is much appreciated!

/Patrik

Answer 1

One option is to check the type of the Selection object returned by window.getSelection:

function toggleInfo() {
    var selection = window.getSelection();
    if(selection.type != "Range") {
        $("#clicktoshow").toggle();
        $("#information").toggle();
    }
}

http://jsfiddle.net/k61u66ek/4/

Update

If the browser you're targeting doesn't expose a type property on the Selection object then you can test against the length of the selected value instead:

function toggleInfo() {
    var selection = window.getSelection();
    if(selection.toString().length === 0) {
        $("#clicktoshow").toggle();
        $("#information").toggle();
    }
}

http://jsfiddle.net/k61u66ek/9/

which can in turn be reduced down to a bool check on toString:

if(!selection.toString()) {

http://jsfiddle.net/k61u66ek/10/