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
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark

    Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...

  • 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...

Discussion

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