html div onclick event

Question

I have one html div on my jsp page, on that i have put one anchor tag, please find code below for that,

<div class="expandable-panel-heading">
     <h2>
         <a id="ancherComplaint" href="#addComplaint" 
                            onclick="markActiveLink(this);">ABC</a>
     </h2>
</div>

js code

$('.expandable-panel-heading:not(#ancherComplaint)').click(function () {
     alert('123');
 });

function markActiveLink(el) {   
    alert($(el).attr("id"));
} 

here I when I click on div I got alert with 123 message, its fine but when I click on ABC I want message I want to call markActiveLink method.

JSFiddle

what is wrong with my code? please help me out.

Answer 1

The problem was that clicking the anchor still triggered a click in your <div>. That's called "event bubbling".

In fact, there are multiple solutions:

• Checking in the DIV click event handler whether the actual target element was the anchor
  → jsFiddle

  $('.expandable-panel-heading').click(function (evt) {
      if (evt.target.tagName != "A") {
          alert('123');
      }
  
      // Also possible if conditions:
      // - evt.target.id != "ancherComplaint"
      // - !$(evt.target).is("#ancherComplaint")
  });
  
  $("#ancherComplaint").click(function () {
      alert($(this).attr("id"));
  });
  

• Stopping the event propagation from the anchor click listener
  → jsFiddle

  $("#ancherComplaint").click(function (evt) {
      evt.stopPropagation();
      alert($(this).attr("id"));
  });
  

---

As you may have noticed, I have removed the following selector part from my examples:

:not(#ancherComplaint)

This was unnecessary because there is no element with the class .expandable-panel-heading which also have #ancherComplaint as its ID.

I assume that you wanted to suppress the event for the anchor. That cannot work in that manner because both selectors (yours and mine) select the exact same DIV. The selector has no influence on the listener when it is called; it only sets the list of elements to which the listeners should be registered. Since this list is the same in both versions, there exists no difference.