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
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

  • By
    Fullscreen API

    As we move toward more true web applications, our JavaScript APIs are doing their best to keep up.  One very simple but useful new JavaScript API is the Fullscreen API.  The Fullscreen API provides a programmatic way to request fullscreen display from the user, and exit...

Discussion

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