Prevent firing focus event when clicking on div

Question

This question is similar to my previous question, Click action on Focused DIV , but this time the main topic is, How to prevent focus event from triggering when I click one of the divs. Last time I had one div with tabindex='-1' to make it focusable on click, now I have a list of divs with tabindex>0 so they can gain focus when tabbing as well.

<div tabindex='1'>Div one</div>
<div tabindex='1'>Div two</div>
<div tabindex='1'>Div tree</div>
<div tabindex='1'>Div four</div>

some styling:

div {
    height: 20px;
    width: 60%;
    border: solid 1px blue;
    text-align: center;
}
div:focus {
    border: solid 2px red;
    outline: none;
}

Now I'm using a flag(action) to fire an action(alert) when clicking the div for 2nd time, and with just one click if it's already focused,with TAB for example.

var action = false;
$('div')
    .click(function(e){
        e.stopImmediatePropagation();
        if(action){alert('action');}
        action = true;})
    .focus(function(){action = true;})
    .blur(function(){action = false;});

The problem with the code above is focus event is being fired, which means stopImmediatePropagation doesn't work the way I expected.. The two click action works commenting the focus event line, but you still need to double click when div gains focus on TAB. Here is the example: http://jsfiddle.net/3MTQK/1/

Answer 1

DEMO here

I think you are missing some parts here,

1. event.stopPropagation() is used to stop the event from bubbling. You can read about it here .

2. event.stopImmediatePropagation() In addition to keeping any additional handlers on an element from being executed, this method also stops the bubbling by implicitly calling event.stopPropagation() . You can read about it here

3. If you want to stop browser events, then you should use event.preventDefault() . You can read about it here

4. click = mousedown + mouseup -> The focus will be set on a HTML element when the mouse down is successful. So instead of binding click event, you should use 'mousedown'. See my demo.

5. You cannot use 1 action boolean value to determine which div is clicked and how many times it has been clicked. Check my Demo to see how you can handle that.

Answer 2

To simply prevent firing focus when clicking on div just use mousedown + event.preventDefault() . Use mousedown rather than click because, as @Selvakumar Arumugam explained, focus fires when mousedown is succesfull and event.preventDefault() will stop browser events (including our focus).

Here's a code example:

$('#div').on('mousedown', function(event) {
// do your magic
event.preventDefault();
});

Answer 3

For the moment the apparent answer would be to restrict your selector from simply 'div' to a system of toggled class names, thereby you could control on what element your focus event would fire. It is more tedious and requires a bit more exception coding, but would do the job.