Is it really necessary manage event handler by ourselves? - javascript

Recently I read John Resig's book Secrets of Javascript Ninja, in the chapter about
element event, he write:
For a number of reasons, it would be advantageous to not bind event
handlers directly to elements.
So in his next code, he define custom addEvent ,detachevent, dispatcher ,triggerevent method, and store event handler into a cache queue and so on.
Despite the browser compatibility issue, is there any other reason don't bind event handler directly to element?

One reason to use this model will be when you are dealing with dynamic elements.
If you want to attach the handlers to the element itself after the creation of the each element you need to attach the handler to it, but I prefer to make use of event delegation and register the handler to an element which will be always there and then filter the target element.

The reason is given in the later part in the same section. I am just copying it for reference:
■ The Event instance is fixed up.
■ The function context is set to the target element.
■ The Event instance is passed to the handler as its sole argument.
■ The event handlers will always be executed in the order in which they were bound.
Besides you have cleaner control over the removal of handlers too.

It's a lot easier to keep track of your event listeners if you keep a reference to each of them and their info. It gives you some extra control; now it's up to you to choose when you need to use it.

Related

Click event for each element or one click event on the document for all?

Let's say I have bunch of click events. Also one/few of them is for document object.
Which one is better for performance? Click event for each element or :
document.addEventListener('click', (e)=>{
if(e.target == firstObject){ firstFunction(e) }
if(e.target == secondObject){ secondFunction(e) }
if(e.target == ThirdObject){ thirdFunction(e) }
})
Neither is "better." They each have their place in your toolkit.
A single delegated handler is more complex in that you have to do the kind of dispatch you're doing in your example (often using closest or matches), but has the advantage that if you're adding/removing elements you want to act on, you don't have to juggle event handlers.
Directly-assigned handlers are simpler (at least on elements that aren't added/removed), can prevent propagation, and let you keep your code more modular, more in keeping with the single responsibility principle.
Use the one that makes the most sense in a given context.
I think event listener for each element is better if possible, and makes sense in terms of code quality. There are some cases though where a document event listener will be needed ( for example to emulate a click outside behaviour)
That being said here are some of reasons that makes event listener for each element a better solution
event propagation is handled for you by the browser, if you decide to have only one event handler for the whole document, and u want to have event listeners for elements that are contained in each other, then you will need to handle propagation your self. That is to say you need to handle the order in which functions run yourself, and then you will have some either complex generic solution, or a specific imperative verbose code with a lot of if else statements.
Easier to read code, this is even more true for recent frameworks for web like react, angular, etc..., so for example assume you want to have a listener for clicks on the document, where that code should reside, in which file, and which component should own the code.
Removal of event listeners is handled for you by the browser apis, the browser gives you a way to remove event listeners. If you decide to go with a global event listener then you should handle removing event listeners yourself.
Your code will be hard to refactor and easier to break later, because you are coupling your document (or container ) event listener to your components internals. That is if you decide to change the structure of these components later, your document based event listener will probably break. This will depend a lot on how you identify the target of clicks, for example if you were identifying them by class names or other attributes, then these attributes might change later for reasons like styling.
and if you depend on ids for example you might eventually have unexpected results. because what happens for example if you added a listener for an element that has id, removed that element, and then later added another element with same id.
You miss on the development tooling provided for you by browsers, browsers can show you attached listeners for elements, with a document based event listener you wont be able to do that
It's better if you add one by one, because then you can remove event whenever it finish. Moreover you have more control about this event.

Why deleting event listeners, ever?

From the Polymer documentation about event listeners:
Use automatic node finding and the convenience methods listen and > unlisten.
this.listen(this.$.myButton, 'tap', 'onTap');
this.unlisten(this.$.myButton, 'tap', 'onTap');
The listener callbacks are invoked with this set to the element instance.
If you add a listener imperatively, you need to remove it imperatively. This is commonly done in the attached and detached callbacks. If you use the listeners object or annotated event listeners, Polymer automatically adds and removes the event listeners.
Questions:
Why is it important to only listen to events of elements in the local DOM after attached(), to then remove them when detached()?
Aren't event listeners deleted automatically when the observed DOM object is destroyed?
Would this also apply to when you listen to events for elements in your light DOM?
Basically, it's just best practise. Older browsers don't handle removal of old events correctly, and if functions have scope references they can cause memory leaks. I guess it's a convention along the lines of "better safe than sorry."
Polymer only removes event listeners it added itself. If you add event listeners yourself (imperatively) you need to remove them yourself.
Code might not be able to get garbage collected if event listeners are referring code.

SAPUI5: How to bind a click event to horizontal layout?

Hi I'm developing my view in JS and I'm stuck in binding a click handler for my horizontal layout element. I've tried using Jquery
$("#myHorizontalLayout").bind("click",function(){window.alert()});
Which didn't work then I tried using attachPress with the element which obviously didn't exist. Please help.
Update:
The JS view is the default view of the application.
When on/bind does not work, it could be that the HTML of the control has actually not been created yet at this point in time. But even if you delay the binding, the re-rendering (re-creation of the HTML after changes) would remove your listener, at least when bound on the control itself.
A proper way of doing this is using the generic attachBrowserEvent function available on every control (here: on the layout) which internally handles all the rendering/rerendering stuff, see this example:
http://jsbin.com/hijutunefi/1/edit?html,output
attachBrowserEvent works for any browser event, as it attaches a new browser event listener to the root node of the control. For the most common browser events UI5 does event delegation, so for the "click" event and several others addEventDelegate can also be used, as pointed out by aborjinik.
Alternatively, listening on the <body> level with normal jQuery mechanisms should in general also work.
Which didn't work then I tried using attachPress with the element which obviously didn't exist. Please help.
Does this means that the element on which you are attaching event handler doesn't exists at this point? If this is the case you can hook the handler to some container, upper in the DOM hierarchy which you are sure that exists and filter the click events.
Example:
$("body").on("click", "#myHorizontalLayout", function(){
alert("Hey, you!");
});
As of jQuery 1.7, the .on() method is the preferred method for
attaching event handlers to a document. For earlier versions, the
.bind() method is used for attaching an event handler directly to
elements. Handlers are attached to the currently selected elements in
the jQuery object, so those elements must exist at the point the call
to .bind() occurs.
Reference here
So try replacing bind with on and let me know if it works or not.

Javascript events - inline vs .on(..), how many handlers it creates?

Assuming I have this code, button with inline onclick event:
<button onclick='..js stuff..'>mybutton</button>
I have this button created multiple times because of server-side loop.
Or I would be better giving a class to these buttons, and just do (using jQuery):
$(".button-class").on('click',function(){..});
What is better in terms of performance?
My questions are-
In the inline onclick, does it creates a handler for each button?
In jQuery event binding, does the handler is created only once, and is binded for each button, or, here as well, the handler is created multiple times?
I guess that these are the factors which affect any performance difference. Perhaps the only downside for .on(..) is that I have to do DOM search by class name. (?)
The answer is: it doesn't matter.
Use the latter (jQuery binding) because it moves the code away from the DOM and makes it easier to work with.
With the inline attribute a different handler is theoretically added for each event; each attribute implicitly creates a new callback/function1 that wraps the supplied code. This handler will be replaced if the attribute (or corresponding DOM property) is assigned a different value later. In the case when all the event handlers have been created this is the "worst" approach in terms of book-keeping.
With the jQuery (addEventListener) version the same function callback is added for all the matching elements. Multiple event handlers for the same element/event may be added; care may be required to avoid unintentional repeated-binding.
Furthermore, with delegated events jQuery could avoid binding to each element separately (ie. it only binds one event handler further up the propagation chain). Depending on how many elements are to have events "attached", this could result in a significant decrease of actual events listened to while still only using a single event handler function.
The chance of their being an actual real-world performance difference between the approaches is slim-to-none, degenerate cases aside. Use the form that is most clear/extensible/maintainable which, IMOHO, is rarely the event properties; especially when embedded directly into HTML attributes. (One issue with the inline attribute form is that it cannot bind to an appropriate closure context and so it must use - ick! - global context in many cases.)
1 Browsers first only had inline events (almost exclusively specified in HTML attributes) and are well-optimized for this case. The actual event handler function is only created on demand. Consider the case of <button onclick="alert(">Hi!</button>, where the "onclick" contains a syntax error in the inline JavaScript. A modern browser will only parse the JS (and thus only create the actual handler function) when the the button is clicked or the .onclick property is read.
Using onclick is frowned upon and considered bad form, you should instead be using element.on('click') with jQuery or ng-click in Angular.js.
They both result in the same number of listeners, and basically the same performance.
The counter part using on.event is: if you reload Or rerender the objects using akax you need to instanciate the on.event again, it creates more code and thats more complicated.

Is it bad to bind behaviours to document unconditionally?

The pagination controls on a page I am working on were being bound conditionally on there being more than 1 page. I don't like to see the following code in my projects,
if (pages > 1) {
$('.some_class').bind('event', function() {});
}
because I feel it represents a disorganized coding style. I would put it on the same level as sprinkling return statements here and there rather than using control. I feel like binding events to globally available objects has no place in the local scope of a function call. So what I usually do is make two javascript files, for example: pagination.js and pagination-controls.js. In the one I have logic about building the html and displaying the the pagination controls. In the other I have statements like the following:
$(document).on('click', '.pagination .next', function() {});
Which fires regardless of whether there is a $('.pagination .next') element anywhere on the page. I like the way that feels: the website has behaviours and it only knows about ids and classes, not about instance variables in some local scope somewhere.
EDIT: this is definitely bad practice, as mentioned below. However:
As of jQuery 1.7, the .on() method is the preferred method for
attaching event handlers to a document.
and the discussion on direct and delegated events is relevant. In particular I think the following describes my usage:
By picking an element that is guaranteed to be present at the time the
delegated event handler is attached, you can use delegated events to
avoid the need to frequently attach and remove event handlers. This
element could be the container element of a view in a
Model-View-Controller design, for example, or document if the event
handler wants to monitor all bubbling events in the document.
EDIT: So I guess now I'm wondering "is it bad to prefer binding behaviours to parent elements unconditionally over binding based on logic?" That's perhaps just a question of style, and my original question has been answered so I think I will accept the answer.
Yes, this is causing significant unnecessary overhead, and it is a "bad practice".
Binding your event handling to the top-level document object means that every single click that occurs on any element anywhere in your page will bubble up to the document object, where the event's target is checked to see if it matches .pagination .next.
In fact, the documentation itself recommends against your usage:
Attaching many delegated event handlers near the top of the document tree can degrade performance. Each time the event occurs, jQuery must compare all selectors of all attached events of that type to every element in the path from the event target up to the top of the document. For best performance, attach delegated events at a document location as close as possible to the target elements. Avoid excessive use of document or document.body for delegated events on large documents.
So, you're misusing on. It's for binding directly to elements or to parent elements which may have dynamically created children, and you are meant to bind to the closest possible parent element. Binding to the document is certainly not meant to be the only way you handle events in your page.

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