Forcing jQuery Mobile to re-evaluate styles/theme on dynamically inserted content

Question

Objective: Load HTML content via $.ajax, insert it into the DOM, have jQuery Mobile apply theme styles to it.

Problem: Content gets inserted but lacks jQuery Mobile theming.

Code:

$.ajax({
    ...
    success: function(html) {
        $('#container').append(html);
        $('#page').page('refresh', true);
    }
});

The HTML returned includes data-role tags which jQM should style...

<a data-role="button">Do Something</a>

Instead of applying the styles like it should, I get the following error:

uncaught exception: no such method 'refresh' for page widget instance

---

Above code tested using http://code.jquery.com/mobile/latest/jquery.mobile.js

---

Similar questions which brought me to the above error message:

Consistently update page with appropriate jQuery Mobile styles

JQM (jQueryMobile) Dynamically added elements not displaying correctly and CSS is not applied

jQuery Mobile - Dynamically creating form elements

Answer 1

Just got an answer to a similar question, try using

.trigger("create")

on the element that gets the content added to.

See here: jQuery Mobile does not apply styles after dynamically adding content

Answer 2

If you add items to a listview, you'll need to call the refresh() method on it to update the styles and create any nested lists that are added. For example:

$('#mylist').listview('refresh');

If you need to render a dynamic page, please read:"jQuery Mobile and Dynamic Page Generation". Sample code from this article:

// Load the data for a specific category, based on
// the URL passed in. Generate markup for the items in the
// category, inject it into an embedded page, and then make
// that page the current active page.
function showCategory( urlObj, options )
{
    var categoryName = urlObj.hash.replace( /.*category=/, "" ),

        // Get the object that represents the category we
        // are interested in. Note, that at this point we could
        // instead fire off an ajax request to fetch the data, but
        // for the purposes of this sample, it's already in memory.
        category = categoryData[ categoryName ],

        // The pages we use to display our content are already in
        // the DOM. The id of the page we are going to write our
        // content into is specified in the hash before the '?'.
        pageSelector = urlObj.hash.replace( /\?.*$/, "" );

    if ( category ) {
        // Get the page we are going to dump our content into.
        var $page = $( pageSelector ),

            // Get the header for the page.
            $header = $page.children( ":jqmData(role=header)" ),

            // Get the content area element for the page.
            $content = $page.children( ":jqmData(role=content)" ),

            // The markup we are going to inject into the content
            // area of the page.
            markup = "<p>" + category.description + "</p><ul data-role='listview' data-inset='true'>",

            // The array of items for this category.
            cItems = category.items,

            // The number of items in the category.
            numItems = cItems.length;

        // Generate a list item for each item in the category
        // and add it to our markup.
        for ( var i = 0; i < numItems; i++ ) {
            markup += "<li>" + cItems[i].name + "</li>";
        }
        markup += "</ul>";

        // Find the h1 element in our header and inject the name of
        // the category into it.
        $header.find( "h1" ).html( category.name );

        // Inject the category items markup into the content element.
        $content.html( markup );

        // Pages are lazily enhanced. We call page() on the page
        // element to make sure it is always enhanced before we
        // attempt to enhance the listview markup we just injected.
        // Subsequent calls to page() are ignored since a page/widget
        // can only be enhanced once.
        $page.page();

        // Enhance the listview we just injected.
        $content.find( ":jqmData(role=listview)" ).listview();

        // We don't want the data-url of the page we just modified
        // to be the url that shows up in the browser's location field,
        // so set the dataUrl option to the URL for the category
        // we just loaded.
        options.dataUrl = urlObj.href;

        // Now call changePage() and tell it to switch to
        // the page we just modified.
        $.mobile.changePage( $page, options );
    }
}

Answer 3

If you're using the ajax method to load into content, this is how I got the styling and jquery mobile functionality to work. It's pretty much the same as the suggestion above but for some people you probably like seeing a more full example.

Here is the code:

$.ajax({
url: 'url.php',
success: function(data) {    
$("#div").html(data).trigger('create');
}
});