Seven Ways to Toggle an Element with JavaScript
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Dustin Diaz
March 30, 2006
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Seven ways to toggle an element with JavaScript
Friday, February 10th, 2006
There are litterally an unlimitted number of ways to toggle an element’s
display with JavaScript. Some, more useful than others. Dating back to the late
nineties, toggling is perhaps the oldest trick in the book within JavaScript
development. However, to this day, it still proves itself useful as
hiding/showing elements can improve user interaction (when done tastefully).
Anyway, here are seven ways toward achieving just that.
The bottom line
First off, this is perhaps the simplest and shortest way to toggle.
toggling the short way
// showing
document.getElementById('element').style.display = '';
// hiding
document.getElementById('element').style.display = 'none';
So let’s make this into a function that’ll get the job done real quick like:
show? or hide?
function toggle(obj) {
var el = document.getElementById(obj);
if ( el.style.display != 'none' ) {
el.style.display = 'none';
}
else {
el.style.display = '';
}
}
Well that was easy. But we can also go ternary style.
toggling ternary style
function toggle(obj) {
var el = document.getElementById(obj);
el.style.display = (el.style.display != 'none' ? 'none' : '' );
}
Cool. Hey, ever heard of the dollar function
(http://www.dustindiaz.com/top-ten-javascript) ? If that’s sittin’ around
somewhere, let’s use it!
toggling with the ternary dollar
// our dollar function
function $() {
var elements = new Array();
for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++) {
var element = arguments[i];
if (typeof element == 'string')
element = document.getElementById(element);
if (arguments.length == 1)
return element;
elements.push(element);
}
return elements;
}
// and now our improved toggler!
function toggle(obj) {
var el = $(obj);
el.style.display = (el.style.display != 'none' ? 'none' : '' );
}
Cool. Now that we’ve got this thing nice and compact… can’t we do anything
else to make it cool? Why, of course. Let’s say, instead of limitting it to
just one object, let’s say “unlimitted.”
toggling multiple objects
function toggle() {
for ( var i=0; i < arguments.length; i++ ) {
$(arguments[i]).style.display = ($(arguments[i]).style.display !=
'none' ? 'none' : '' );
}
}
Sweet. Now that looks nice and sexy (quite personally, I think it’s the
sexi’est’). But let’s see if we can extract any of these into “showing” versus
“hiding” using an object literal.
separating showing and hiding
var toggle = {
show : function(obj) {
document.getElementById(obj).style.display = '';
},
hide : function(obj) {
document.getElementById(obj).style.display = 'none';
}
};
Alright alright alright, I can dig that. But what happened to using our
dollar buddy? Surely we can get that back in the mix.
separating showing and hiding
var toggle = {
show : function(obj) {
$(obj).style.display = '';
},
hide : function(obj) {
$(obj).style.display = 'none';
}
};
Ok, why not even give it the flexibility of passing in as many arguments as
we want to either? Ok, no problem.
separating showing and hiding
var toggle = {
show : function() {
for ( i=0; i < arguments.length; i++ ) {
$(arguments[i]).style.display = '';
}
},
hide : function() {
for ( i=0; i < arguments.length; i++ ) {
$(arguments[i]).style.display = 'none';
}
}
};
Cool. That pretty much covers it. You can view the multiple toggler function
in action at http://www.dustindiaz.com/basement/toggle.html.
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