jQuery: how does one disable everything inside a div? but still keep everything visible?

Question

The goal is to disable all the links, when one is clicked, and then disable all the links until the server sends an undisable command (using a similar method that would be used to disable).

So, since all the links are in one containing div, I figure I could just temporarily disable that.

How would I go about doing that?

Answer 1

If you just want to disable the default link behaviour, you can use a combination of delegate and event.preventDefault:

$('#container').delegate('a', 'click', function(e) {
    if (linksDisabled) {
        e.preventDefault();
    }
});

You can then set linksDisabled (in a parent scope) to true or false in your other event handlers as appropriate.

If these links are doing Javascripty things, it's a bit trickier. It would probably be easiest to put the if (linksDisabled) check in each event handler.

Answer 2

Try this:

$("#YOUR_DIV a").click(function(){
 return false;
})