setting the id attribute of an input element dynamically in IE: alternative for setAttribute method

Question

This code work in IE7 and Chrome:

var hiddenInput = document.createElement("input");
    hiddenInput.setAttribute("id", "uniqueIdentifier");
    hiddenInput.setAttribute("type", "hidden");                     
    hiddenInput.setAttribute("value", 'ID');
    hiddenInput.setAttribute("class", "ListItem");

$('body').append(hiddenInput);

Maybe problem somewhere else ?

Forget setAttribute(): it's badly broken and doesn't always do what you might expect in old IE (IE <= 8 and compatibility modes in later versions). Use the element's properties instead. This is generally a good idea, not just for this particular case. Replace your code with the following, which will work in all major browsers:

var hiddenInput = document.createElement("input");
hiddenInput.id = "uniqueIdentifier";
hiddenInput.type = "hidden";                     
hiddenInput.value = ID;
hiddenInput.className = "ListItem";

Update

The nasty hack in the second code block in the question is unnecessary, and the code above works fine in all major browsers, including IE 6. See http://www.jsfiddle.net/timdown/aEvUT/. The reason why you get null in your alert() is that when it is called, the new input is not yet in the document, hence the document.getElementById() call cannot find it.

Use jquery attr method. It works in all browsers.

var hiddenInput = document.createElement("input");
$(hiddenInput).attr({
    'id':'uniqueIdentifier',
    'type': 'hidden',
    'value': ID,
    'class': 'ListItem'
});

Or you could use folowing code:

var e = $('<input id = "uniqueIdentifier" type="hidden" value="' + ID + '" class="ListItem" />');

I wasn't aware of a problem with setAttribute in IE ? However you could directly set the expando property on the node itself:

hiddenInput.id = "uniqueIdentifier";

The documentation says:

When you need to set attributes that are also mapped to a JavaScript dot-property (such as href, style, src or event-handlers), favour that mapping instead.

So, just change id, value assignment and you should be done.

I had the same issue! I was unable to change/set the ID attribute of elements. It worked in all other browsers but not IE. It probably isn't relevant to your problem but here is what I ended up doing:

Background

I was building an MVC site with jquery tabs. I wanted to create tabs dynamically and do an AJAX postback to the server saving the tab in the database. I wanted to use a unique identifier, in the form of an int, for the tabs so I wouldn't get in to trouble if a user created two tabs with the same name. I then used the unique ID to identify the tabs like:

<ul>
<li><a href='#{href}'>#{label}</a> <span class='ui-icon ui-icon-close'>Remove List</span></li>
<ul>

When I then implemented the remove functions on the tabs the callback uses the index, witch is 0 based. Then I had no way to sending back the unique ID to the server to trash the DB entry. The callback for the tabremove event gives the jquery event and ui parameters. With one line of code I could get the ID of the span:

var dbIndex = event.currentTarget.id;

The problem was that the span tag didn't have any ID. So in the create callback I tried to set the ID buy extracting the ID from the a href like this:

ui.tab.parentNode.id = ui.tab.href.substring(ui.tab.href.indexOf('#list-') + 6);

That worked fine in FireFox but not in IE. So I tried a few other:

//ui.tab.parentNode.setAttribute('id', ui.tab.href.substring(ui.tab.href.indexOf('#list-') + 6));
//$(ui.tab.parentNode).attr({'id':ui.tab.href.substring(ui.tab.href.indexOf('#list-') + 6)});
//ui.tab.parentNode.id.value = ui.tab.href.substring(ui.tab.href.indexOf('#list-') + 6);

None of them worked! So after a few hours of test and Googeling I gave up and draw the conclusion that IE cant set the ID attribute of an element dynamically.

As I sad this is probably not relevant to your issue but I thought I would share.

Solution

And for all of you who found this by Googleing on the tabs issue I had here is what I ended up doing in the tabsremove callback to solve the issue:

var dbIndex = event.currentTarget.offsetParent.childNodes[0].href.substring(event.currentTarget.offsetParent.childNodes[0].href.indexOf('#list-') + 6);

Probably not the sexiest solution but hey it solved the issue. If anyone have any input please share...