jQuery - raise event when focus leaves a group of controls

Question

I have 3 textboxes within a div and I need to raise an event when focus leaves one of those inputs and doesn't go to another one of these 3 inputs.

As long as the user is editing one of these 3 controls, the event wont raise. The event will only raise when the focus has changed to a control which isn't one of these inputs.

I tried using focusout on all 3 inputs and checking if document.ActiveElement is one of the 3 inputs but focusout of one control occurs before focusin on another so document.ActiveElement is always empty.

Anyone has any idea how to get around this?

Answer 1

I would consider using a timer to solve this tricky dilemma.

When focus is lost, start the timer. Then you can cancel the timer if focus is then set upon another "safe" input.

Something like this:

var timeoutID;

$("#TheSafeZone input").focus(function () {
    if (timeoutID) {
        clearTimeout(timeoutID);
        timeoutID = null;
    }
});

$("#TheSafeZone input").blur(function () {
    releaseTheHounds();
});

function releaseTheHounds() {
    timeoutID = setTimeout(function () {
            alert("You're all going to die down here");
    }, 1);
}

Here is a working example

NOTE: I have set the timeout to just 1ms, this seems to work reliably for me but it may be worth doing a few tests in other browsers (I am using Chrome). I guess it is down to how the JS engine handles events, but I don't know enough about that to confidently say all browsers will work the same