Stopping propagation of mousedown/mouseup from a click handler

Josh Smith picture Josh Smith · Jan 16, 2012 · Viewed 21.2k times · Source

Here's a DEMO.

I have two divs, an inner and an outer:

<div id="outer">
    <div id="inner"></div>
</div>

With some CSS so you can see which is which:

#outer {
    width: 250px;
    height: 250px;
    padding: 50px;
    background: yellow;
}

#inner {
    width: 250px;
    height: 250px;
    background: blue;
}

I try to stop propagation of mousedown and mouseup events from within a click handler like so:

$('#inner').on('click', function(e) {
    e.stopPropagation();
    $(this).css({'background': 'green'});
    return false;
});

$('#outer').on('mousedown', function(e) {
    $(this).css({'background': 'green'});
});

$('#outer').on('mouseup', function(e) {
    $(this).css({'background': 'yellow'});
});

This doesn't seem possible. What does work is calling .stopPropagation from within other mousedown and mouseup calls, as shown here (another DEMO):

$('#inner').on('mousedown', function(e) {
    e.stopPropagation();
    return false;
});

$('#inner').on('mouseup', function(e) {
    e.stopPropagation();
    return false;
});

I may have already answered my own question, but I'm not sure if my approach is the best or most reasonable. Is this the right way to stop an event bubbling up to a mousedown and mouseup?

Answer

Jeff picture Jeff · Jan 16, 2012

Yes. Since mouseclick and mousedown/mouseup are different events, you can't get at one from the other at all - you have to do it from within your own mousedown/mouseup handlers. What you can do is refactor that into a generic method to use in both places:

stopPropagation('#inner', 'mousedown');
stopPropagation('#inner', 'mouseup');

function stopPropagation(id, event) {
    $(id).on(event, function(e) {
        e.stopPropagation();
        return false;
    });
}