How to make a Bootstrap 3 dropdown menu open by default when it is inside a collapsed navbar

Question

I'm trying to make my dropdown menu open by default when my collapsed navbar is opened. Here is a fiddle to show my code so far.

Currently, if you click on the navbar when it's in a collapsed state, two links and a dropdown menu are revealed. You have to click again to open the dropdown menu.

My aim is to make the dropdown menu open by default and hide the a.dropdown-toggle element when the collapsed navbar is opened. A visual of how I'd like it to look when the collapsed navbar is opened:

• Link
• Link
• Dropdown
• Action
• Another action
• Something else here
• Separated link
• One more separated link

My first thought was to use display: none on a.dropdown-toggle but that just hides the whole dropdown menu. Hoping someone can suggest something. I'm open to both jQuery and CSS solutions.

My markup:

<nav class="navbar navbar-default" role="navigation">
  <div class="container-fluid">
    <!-- Brand and toggle get grouped for better mobile display -->
    <div class="navbar-header">
      <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#bs-example-navbar-collapse-1">
        <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span>
        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
      </button>
      <a class="navbar-brand" href="#">Brand</a>
    </div>

    <!-- Collect the nav links, forms, and other content for toggling -->
    <div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="bs-example-navbar-collapse-1">
      <ul class="nav navbar-nav">
        <li class="active"><a href="#">Link</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">Link</a></li>
        <li class="dropdown">
          <a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">Dropdown <span class="caret"></span></a>
          <ul class="dropdown-menu" role="menu">
            <li><a href="#">Action</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">Another action</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">Something else here</a></li>
            <li class="divider"></li>
            <li><a href="#">Separated link</a></li>
            <li class="divider"></li>
            <li><a href="#">One more separated link</a></li>
          </ul>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div><!-- /.navbar-collapse -->
  </div><!-- /.container-fluid -->
</nav>

Answer 1

You can add css style for responsive mobile display. paste it into your css file:

@media only screen and (max-width:480px){
    .dropdown-menu{
        display: block;
        position: static;
        background-color:transparent;
        border:0 none;
        box-shadow:none;
        margin-top:0;
        position:static;
        width:100%;
    }
    .navbar-nav .dropdown-menu > li > a, 
    .navbar-nav .dropdown-menu .dropdown-header {
        padding:5px 15px 5px 25px;
    }
    .navbar-nav .dropdown-menu > li > a{
        line-height:20px;
    }
    .navbar-default .navbar-nav .dropdown-menu > li > a{    
        color:#777;
    }
}

you can see it in its entirety here : Demo jsfiddle

hope that helps.

Answer 2

According to the docs for Bootstrap v3, you can use Javascript to hook on the collapse events:

$(function () {
  $('#bs-example-navbar-collapse-1').on('shown.bs.collapse', function(e) {
    $('#my_dropdown').dropdown('toggle', 'open').hide();
    console.log('shown:', e);
  });
});

I'm not sure the result is what you want, because while the "toggle" button is hidden, the submenu is still indented. Instead of trying to bend Bootstrap that much, perhaps a better solution is having 2 menus with the desired structure for each screen size and show one or another based on media queries.

Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/scardine/tw82o88y/