jQuery Forum

How would you get from newDiv to  anotherNewDiv? Do they come in pairs? does one directly follow the other? Is one inside the other?

JΛ̊KE

You do stay busy on this forum, jakecigar!!

 

I will direct you back to the script as it exists now (it may change somewhat from the time of writing this, but you'll get the basic idea): http://www.jamesmehaffey.com/image_gallery01.php

 

So when this page loads you will see 1) topMenu, 2) subMenu and 3) thumbMenu. On page load they fade into view in sequence with the function to "load" content into topMenu firing first, followed by a second function to "load" subMenu.

 

The function for thumbMenu is buried inside that of subMenu, the reason being that the selected sub menu section in the xml file is checked for valid images (if it contains any entries and if the files exists) before any content is displayed. For example, if a subcategory contains no valid images, it is skipped and so no subMenu link is added. Likewise, if and image within the selected subcategory does not exists it, it will not be added to thumbMenu so as to avoid any nasty-looking broken links.

 

It would be easier to have a third function to load thumbMenu, but if there were any problems with the first (or the first 100) subcategory or images the page would load with no content or lots of broken links. So the thumbMenu function relies on a series of error-checking tasks that are done first in subMenu.

 

After page load, clicking on a topMenu category triggers the same subMenu function, using ".live('click', etc.)", but this time information is passed from the clicked item into the subMenu function. As before, the subMenu function does its thing and fires the thumbMenu function. Clicking on a subMenu option reloads thumbMenu, but the biggest difference here is that the function is fired off in the ".live()" event instead of from within the SubMenu function (b/c the subMenu table has already been built).

 

You will see that it all works in the demo script, but in an earlier version the div containing thumbMenu, which is still present on page load, was manipulated so as to disappear, reload with the new thumbMenu table, and then gently fade back into view. Now, though, I do not want to work with this div (the white display area), and instead disappear and fade in the dynamic thumbMenu table itself. And this is where I'm having my problem.

 

Hope that all makes sense.

JΛ̊KE

Ha!! Sorry about that... I didn't mean for you to have to dig through all that code. What I see on my end is in php, so all the greek makes sense to me. Seriously, all apologies (I feel somewhat better, though, that I didn't have the minify function turned on so you didn't have to look through one huge line of script).

 

Anyway, I'll have a careful look at your post tomorrow. To your point about the 404 thing, it does seem to do its intended job in the sense that if I remove an image file from the server, it does remove the item from the thumb list rather than an empty spot with a broken link. But, again, I'll have to look at this tomorrow with fresh eyes. I'll have to look at the other thing tomorrow too, b/c it's late... and I've discovered that drinking beer and writing code with little sleep don't really mix so well.

 

Seriously though, thanks again for all of your guidance. It has been very helpful.

Got it!! I had a good sleep and, of course, pondered the problem in dream form:

 

Basically, if I create a new object, let's say thingOne, and I want to have it do something to another new object, let's say thingTwo, then thingTwo has to exist before thingOne is created. In my script, as of now, the subMenu function creates the table and then tries to animate it's properties, but because the table wasn't there before the subMenu object it doesn't know it's there, so to speak.

 

I haven't done this yet (though I have done a rough test to verify the solution), but rather than rewrite the script entirely I think I will wrap the thumb table in an empty div which will be created on page load, and then the subMenu function should be able to animate the opacity of this new div rather than the table.

 

So simply put, as far as I can tell, newly created objects can only affect objects that are present when that object is created. It doesn't seem to matter if those other objects are there on page load (in the original html) or dynamically created, just as long as they are there before the new thing tries to do something to them.

 

Anyway, thanks again for your help, jakecigar. Also I know how weird my code must look, and I absolutely hate trying to make sense of other peoples' code even at its tidiest... so please feel free to not to try that again.