Select box needs option to not open long lists in new page
So I've been complaining a lot about select boxes lately because it's in my opinion one of the most needed yet ironically buggiest widget in jQM.
Here are my current complaints:
http://forum.jquery.com/topic/global-select-box-display-bug
I just ran into another situation where I was loosing my current page's "state" and then I realized it's because the select box opens long lists in its own on the fly created page. I knew this before but the connection wasn't being made until just now when I realized the implications. If you run a javascript function to wireup functionality on a form page using the 'pageshow' event, your state resets every time a select box with a long list is used because when the option list on the fly page hides again, it will re-run that same initializer function. So if any locally scoped variables are set on initialization, they will be reset to defaults after a select box is viewed... all bindings are re-fired... any code to reset your app state per page to get around caching is called again... etc. I think for some app pages this will be a complete dead end as right now this is yet another brick wall I hit with select boxes which are just essentially unusable to me. This should either be an option or I think an overlay needs to be looked into instead of doing this as a separate "page" in jQM terms which messes everything up. I don't see a reason why an overlay couldn't be used like the small list version except... make it bigger and imitate the page look instead of it actually being a new page. I think overall the select box really needs re-thought because it just has so many problems making it impossible to use for any advanced app functionality.
As a temp solution, I was hoping to comment out the parts in jQM framework for the selectmenu widget that decides if it will use a on fly created page (since these are the root of all select box evil) so it will be forced to use the overlay list view meant for small option lists. However, as someone pointed out (in the link above about other select box problems), on iPads and Androids if you try using the overlay view for long lists of option items, it starts too high on the screen cutting it off so that's another dead end on that solution. Ill be switching back to pretty CSS3 normal select boxes or trying to re-code the widget to work right.