Does AJAX loaded content get a "document.ready"?

user2762294 picture user2762294 · Nov 27, 2013 · Viewed 73.6k times · Source

Yesterday I had an issue where a .on('click') event handler I was assigning wasn't working right. Turns out it's because I was was trying to apply that .on('click') before that element existed in the DOM, because it was being loaded via AJAX, and therefore didn't exist yet when the document.ready() got to that point.

I solved it with an awkward workaround, but my question is, if I were to put a <script> tag IN the ajax loaded content and another document.ready() within that, would that second document.ready() be parsed ONLY once that ajax content is done being loaded? In other words, does it consider that separately loaded ajax content to be another document, and if so, does having another document.ready() within that ajax-loaded HTML work the way I think it does?

Alternatively; what would be a better way to handle this situation? (needing to attach an event listener to a DOM element that doesn't yet exist on document.ready())

Answer

nbar picture nbar · Nov 27, 2013

To answer your question: No, document.ready will not fire again once a ajax request is completed. (The content in the ajax is loaded into your document, so there isn't a second document for the ajax content).

To solve your problem just add the event listener to the Element where you load the ajax content into it. For example:

$( "div.ajaxcontent-container" ).on( "click", "#id-of-the-element-in-the-ajax-content", function() {
  console.log($( this ));
});

For #id-of-the-element-in-the-ajax-content you can use any selector you would use in $("selector"). The only difference is, only elements under div.ajaxcontent-container will be selected.

How it works: As long as div.ajaxcontent-container exists all elements (if they exist now or only in the future) that match the selector #id-of-the-element-in-the-ajax-content will trigger this click-event.