Event on a disabled input

Question

Disabled elements don't fire mouse events. Most browsers will propagate an event originating from the disabled element up the DOM tree, so event handlers could be placed on container elements. However, Firefox doesn't exhibit this behaviour, it just does nothing at all when you click on a disabled element.

I can't think of a better solution but, for complete cross browser compatibility, you could place an element in front of the disabled input and catch the click on that element. Here's an example of what I mean:

<div style="display:inline-block; position:relative;">
  <input type="text" disabled />
  <div style="position:absolute; left:0; right:0; top:0; bottom:0;"></div>
</div>​

jq:

$("div > div").click(function (evt) {
    $(this).hide().prev("input[disabled]").prop("disabled", false).focus();
});​

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/RXqAm/170/ (updated to use jQuery 1.7 with prop instead of attr).

Disabled elements "eat" clicks in some browsers - they neither respond to them, nor allow them to be captured by event handlers anywhere on either the element or any of its containers.

IMHO the simplest, cleanest way to "fix" this (if you do in fact need to capture clicks on disabled elements like the OP does) is just to add the following CSS to your page:

input[disabled] {pointer-events:none}

This will make any clicks on a disabled input fall through to the parent element, where you can capture them normally. (If you have several disabled inputs, you might want to put each into an individual container of its own, if they aren't already laid out that way - an extra <span> or a <div>, say - just to make it easy to distinguish which disabled input was clicked).

---

The downside is that this trick unfortunately won't works for older browsers that don't support the pointer-events CSS property. (It should work from IE 11, FF v3.6, Chrome v4): caniuse.com/#search=pointer-events

If you need to support older browsers, you'll need to use one of the other answers!

Maybe you could make the field readonly and on submit disable all readonly fields

$(".myform").submit(function(e) {
  $("input[readonly]").prop("disabled", true);
});

and the input (+ script) should be

<input type="text" readonly="readonly" name="test" value="test" />

$('input[readonly]').click(function () {
  $(this).removeAttr('readonly');
});

A live example:

$(".myform").submit(function(e) {
  $("input[readonly]").prop("disabled", true);
  e.preventDefault();
});


$('.reset').click(function () {
  $("input[readonly]").prop("disabled", false);
})

$('input[readonly]').click(function () {
  $(this).removeAttr('readonly');
})

input[readonly] {
  color: gray;
  border-color: currentColor;
}

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<form class="myform">
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  <input readonly="readonly" value="test" />
  
  <button>Submit</button>
  <button class="reset" type="button">Reset</button>
</form>

I would suggest an alternative - use CSS:

input.disabled {
    user-select : none;
    -moz-user-select : none;
    -webkit-user-select : none;
    color: gray;
    cursor: pointer;
}

instead of the disabled attribute. Then, you can add your own CSS attributes to simulate a disabled input, but with more control.

$(function() {

  $("input:disabled").closest("div").click(function() {
    $(this).find("input:disabled").attr("disabled", false).focus();
  });

});

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

<div>
  <input type="text" disabled />
</div>