Jquery Mobile Api Events

jQuery Mobile offers several custom events that build upon native events to create useful hooks for development. Note that these events employ various touch, mouse, and window events, depending on event existence, so you can bind to them for use in both handheld and desktop environments. You can bind to these events like you would with other jQuery events, using live() or bind().

Touch events

tap

Triggers after a quick, complete touch event.

taphold

Triggers after a held complete touch event (close to one second).

swipe

Triggers when a horizontal drag of 30px or more (and less than 20px vertically) occurs within 1 second duration.

swipeleft

Triggers when a swipe event occurred moving in the left direction.

swiperight

Triggers when a swipe event occurred moving in the right direction.

Orientation change event

orientationchange

Triggers when a device orientation changes (by turning it vertically or horizontally). When bound to this event, your callback function can leverage a second argument, which contains an orientation property equal to either "portrait" or "landscape". These values are also added as classes to the HTML element, allowing you to leverage them in your CSS selectors. Note that we currently bind to the resize event when orientationChange is not natively supported.

Scroll events

scrollstart

Triggers when a scroll begins. Note that iOS devices freeze DOM manipulation during scroll, queuing them to apply when the scroll finishes. We're currently investigating ways to allow DOM manipulations to apply before a scroll starts.

scrollstop

Triggers when a scroll finishes.

Page show/hide events

Whenever a page is shown or hidden in jQuery Mobile, two events are triggered on that page. The events triggered depend on whether that page is being shown or hidden, so when a page transition occurs, there are actually 4 events triggered: 2 for each page.

pagebeforeshow

Triggered on the page being shown, before its transition begins.

pagebeforehide

Triggered on the page being hidden, before its transition begins.

pageshow

Triggered on the page being shown, after its transition completes.

pagehide

Triggered on the page being hidden, after its transition completes.

Note that all four of these events expose a reference to either the next page (nextPage) or previous page (prevPage), depending on whether the page is being shown or hidden, and whether that next or previous page exists (the first ever page shown does not have a previous page to reference, but an empty jQuery object is provided just the same). You can access this reference via the second argument of a bound callback function. For example:

  
$('div').live('pageshow',function(event, ui){
  alert('This page was just hidden: '+ ui.prevPage);
});

$('div').live('pagehide',function(event, ui){
  alert('This page was just shown: '+ ui.nextPage);
});
  
  

Also, for these handlers to be invoked during the initial page load, you must bind them before jQuery Mobile executes. This can be done in the mobileinit handler, as described on the global config page.

Page initialization events

Internally, jQuery Mobile auto-initializes plugins based on the markup conventions found in a given "page". For example, an input element with a type of range will automatically generate a custom slider control.

This auto-initialization is controlled by the "page" plugin, which dispatches events before and after it executes, allowing you to manipulate a page either pre-or-post initialization, or even provide your own intialization behavior and prevent the auto-initializations from occuring. Note that these events will only fire once per "page", as opposed to the show/hide events, which fire every time a page is shown and hidden.

pagebeforecreate

Triggered on the page being initialized, before initialization occurs.

pagecreate

Triggered on the page being initialized, after initialization occurs.

  
$('#aboutPage').live('pagebeforecreate',function(event){
  alert('This page was just inserted into the dom!');
});

$('#aboutPage').live('pagecreate',function(event){
  alert('This page was just enhanced by jQuery Mobile!');
});
  
  

Note that by binding to pagebeforecreate and returning false, you can prevent the page plugin from making its manipulations.

  
$('#aboutPage').live('pagebeforecreate',function(event){
  //run your own enhancement scripting here...
  return false;
});

  
  

Note on Page IDs in Alpha 2 release (no longer an issue): In jQuery Mobile Alpha 2 and older, page elements utilized the ID attribute for storing the location from which they came. When you place an ID attribute on a page that is brought into jQuery Mobile's single-page environment through Ajax, jQuery Mobile wraps that page with a new "page" div element, preserving any CSS references to your ID. However, this means that your IDattribute is no longer on the "page" element, so you must keep this in mind when binding to page events (pagebeforecreate, pagecreate, etc). To avoid issues, try using a class if possible.

Animation Events

jQuery Mobile exposes the animationComplete plugin, which you can utilize after adding or removing a class that applies a CSS transition.