Inspect jQuery Element Events

By  on  

Building on top of other tools can be incredibly difficult, especially when you didn't create the other tool and you can't replace that tool.  And when those other tools create loads of event listeners, you sometimes see odd behavior within the page and have no idea what the hell is going on.  Unfortunately a large part of client side coding and library usage comes down to fighting your own tools.

Luckily jQuery allows you inspect events that have been registered to a given element!  Here's the magic:

// First argument is the element you want to inspect
jQuery._data(document.body, "events");

jQuery Events

What's returned is an object whose keys represent the event names and the values are arrays of event handles that have been registered to the element and in the order they were registered.  You can even inspect the function URL location and its contents, then allowing you to see what code is messing with your page.  And then, after you've cursed out the other tool, you can monkey patch the problematic function.

Event listeners can really cause debugging misdirection within JavaScript, especially when you aren't an expert with a given framework.  Take the time to learn to leverage as many helper methods as you can -- they will save you hours of frustration.

Recent Features

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5’s window.postMessage API

    One of the little known HTML5 APIs is the window.postMessage API.  window.postMessage allows for sending data messages between two windows/frames across domains.  Essentially window.postMessage acts as cross-domain AJAX without the server shims. Let's take a look at how window.postMessage works and how you...

  • By
    Using MooTools For Opacity

    Although it's possible to achieve opacity using CSS, the hacks involved aren't pretty. If you're using the MooTools JavaScript library, opacity is as easy as using an element's "set" method. The following MooTools snippet takes every image with the "opacity" class and sets...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!