temporarily removing and later reinserting a DOM element?

Question

Is there some jquery magic that will let me do the following:

[0- define some element in HTML (eg, a unchecked checkbox)]

1- update its DOM element by setting one of its attributes using .attr() (eg, by setting its "checked" attribute using .attr('checked', true) )

2- temporarily remove that element from the DOM

3- reinsert the original element into the DOM, while preserving all its properties (ie, so that it is checked as it was at the end of step 1-- NOT like it was when initially defined in the HTML)

The reason why I am interested in removing these elements from the DOM (rather than hiding them) is that I have noticed that it seems to improve performance a good bit. My page has three different "states" and only a third of the total number of DOM elements is needed in any given state. [I wish to keep it as a single page with different states rather than breaking it into three separate pages.]

Until now I had been removing and reinserting elements into the DOM by storing in a var the value of

$("#myElement").html() 

and then removing it, but now I noticed that upon reinsertion of that HTML into the DOM the changes made [in step 1] had been "undone".

Is there a way to do this -- to temporarily remove unneeded stuff from the DOM in a way that preserves all its properties for later reinsertion?

thanks for any insight,

lara

Answer 1

Six days after the question was answered jQuery released 1.4 which contains the detach method. Which does exactly what you're looking for.

var detached = $('#element').detach(); $('body').append(detached);