JQuery val() does not work for textarea in Opera

Question

I am displaying a modal dialog using jQuery. This dialog has a textarea control on it. But while submitting this dialog, the value of this textarea is not recognized by jQuery for some reason: it always comes blank. This works perfectly in other browsers. I put alert to display the value but it looks blank. Can anybody help me in this regards?

Controls:

<input type="text" id="txtGroupName"/>
<textarea rows="3" cols="30" id="txtDescription"></textarea>

jQuery code which used this value:

var postData = new Object();
postData.GroupName = $('#txtGroupName').val();
postData.Description = $('#txtDescription').val();

$('#txtDescription').val() comes blank but $('#txtGroupName').val() is read correctly as it is a input field.

One more finding about this issue:

When I put alert in my update function after populating the control value on page load, this alert displays the existing value properly. But it displays only existing value. It does not display the edited value after submitting the modal box.

Answer 1

val() and text() in jquery works correctly, but after setting value of textarea you need to rerender textarea, you can do this setting css property in such way

if ($.browser.opera)
    $('textarea').val(someText).css({display:block});
else
    $('textarea').val(someText);

Hello from Russia. Sorry for my english =)