The event object
So far, we attached anonymous functions as event handlers. To make our event handlers more generic and useful, we can create named functions and assign them to the events. Consider the following lines:
function handlesClicks(event){ //Handle click event } $("#bigButton").on('click', handlesClicks);
Here, we are passing a named function instead of an anonymous function to the on()
method. Let's shift our focus now to the event
parameter that we pass to the function. jQuery passes an event object with all the event callbacks. An event object contains very useful information about the event being triggered. In cases where we don't want the default behavior of the element to kick in, we can use the preventDefault()
method of the event object. For example, we want to fire an AJAX request instead of a complete form submission or we want to prevent the default location to be opened when a URL anchor is clicked on. In these cases, you may also want to prevent the event from bubbling...