jQuery Mobile 1.4 Page Navigation - jquery-mobile

I need to use jQuery Mobile to build an app and I'm stuck at page navigation. I'm using jQuery Mobile 1.4. And the documentation doesn't help me very much. I have a few questions. Any help would be appreciated. Also please point out if I misunderstood anything.
I understood that $.mobile.navigate is the recommended method to change between pages in jQuery Mobile 1.4. Hoe can I use it to send data from one page to another?
What is the need for pagecontainer widget's load method? The change method itself seems to load an external page.
When I use the pagecontainer widget's change method to load an external page, it loads the page into the DOM and changes to it as expected. But, when I go back, the external page is removed from the DOM. Is there anyway to load an external page only once and let it persist in the DOM as long as the app is running?

Related

jQuery Mobile 1.4+ - preloading pages / precalculating offsets

I want to perform some operations (calculating element offsets) on a dynamically created JQM page when my app first runs. At the moment the page is built too slowly and the code returns an offset of 0 for every element. It seems that caching it might be the answer (it's a multipage JQM app with a single HTML file). Older answers to this problem on SO suggested using $.mobile.loadPage but as of 1.4 this is deprecated. The jQuery API documentation isn't the clearest on this issue - it suggests using the load method of the pagecontainer widget
$( ".selector" ).pagecontainer( "load" );
and that
The pagecontainer widget is designed to be a singleton instantiated by the framework on the body element.
I assumed this meant a pagecontainer is created automatically but if I try and run the snippet above I get an error saying I can't run pagecontainer methods before instantiating one. The JQM pagecontainer reference doesn't provide an example of how to instantiate one.
My questions are
Does preloading / caching actually render the page in the background? Will precalculating offsets even be possible?
Do I even need to use the pagecontainer load method to preload an internal page?
The docs seem to suggest that load is for loading external resources - is it relevant for internal "pages"?
Should I use something like data-dom-cache="true" instead? Or data-prefetch? These seem to be for external resources...
Would really appreciate some guidance on best practices here - the only other alternative is running a setTimeout on the offending page of the app while the code runs, but this is horrible.

Backbone and jQuery Mobile App resetting after browser back button

I am building an app using Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile. On some pages in my app I have external href links and I'm running into an issue.
When a user clicks and external href link, get taken to the external site and then hits the back button. My app does not load from the proper page where the user originally left the app from.
In fact my entire DOM is reset so it looks like my site gets a complete refresh and doesn't keep any of its former state.
I have been trying to search for a solution but this issue is kind of hard to word out. I hope it makes sense.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
UPDATE
Stupid error on my part.. I had a bad id set on the page and it didn't load the data I had saved in the session for it when a user returns to the page.. Changed the id and all is well. Thanks!
Link
Make you external links open up new tabs.
If you have used one html with multiple pages solution then there's an explanation for this.
rel="external" will cause a full page refresh so last page location will not be remebered. When you return to the last location it will trigger new refresh and the first page will be shown again.
This can be prevented with a multiple html page solution.

jquery mobile - requesting multi-page page via changePage

From the index page of the site, I am loading another page which has 3 divs with the data-role of page.
However, jquery mobile only appends one of the pages to the dom.
I presume the changePage function is grabbing the first div with a data-role of page and inserting it. I wonder if there is a way to get it to insert all the divs with a data-role of page or dialog.
Any help more than appreciated.
thanks
What you are trying to do is currently not possible with JQM, as only the first page from a multipage gets loaded into the DOM.
I would point point you to a link in the JQM docs that would explain this behavior, but there isn't one... I already filed this as issue on Github, so that the Docs at least make clear what you can do and what does not work with multipages.
As I'm stuck with the same issue I started writing a plugin to be able to load multipages (among other things). I still have a few things to sort out, but when it's working I can send you the link.
You can use a "subpage" plugin to get the behavior you desire. Basically one page contains a bunch of subpages, which all get loaded into DOM. The pattern would be:
<div data-role="page">
<div data-role="subpage">
</div>
<div data-role="subpage">
</div>
<div data-role="subpage">
</div>
</div>
The project is available here: https://github.com/ToddThomson/jQuery-Mobile-Subpage-Widget.
I've personally been having problems with this plugin, but I think for simple scenarios, it works fine.
Also, there is no documentation for it. For example, I still don't know the proper way to call $.mobile.changePage() with this plugin. :)
According to JQM at this page:
"jQuery Mobile currently only supports loading of single page documents via AJAX. To navigate to a multi page document you must disable ajax on the link by adding the data-ajax="false" attribute. There is also a widget to allow for supporting sub-pages by Todd Thompson available at https://github.com/ToddThomson/jQuery-Mobile-Subpage-Widget"
You can also add rel="external" attribute to the href pointing to Page B.
rel="external" and data-ajax="false" will force JQM to load the entire page as new. Unfortunately, it appears this removes the ability to use a page transition from PageA to PageB.
Example: Page B
I'm now looking to load Page B with JQM methods instead of relying on the automagic mechanisms. It appears you must use single page templating throughout (as recommended) or pagecontainer load method (essentially the same as single page) if you want hashtag transitions within a "single page", after the DOM is initially loaded. For example, link to a single page, listen to "pageinit" of that page, then use pagecontainer("load"). Make sure the subsequent page (the page your're injecting) is not needed as a direct incoming page.

JQuery Mobile, problem with loading form submitted pages

I'm working on a mobile view of our site. I'm trying to implement JQuery mobile but I'm seeing two issues that might prevent me from continuing and hoping some of you have insights.
Many pages are brought up by searches. But when the page is brought up from a search box I can't get it to load as rel='external', thus the page loads via Ajax. Great, except the pages that load are almost always larger pages broken up into data-role='page'. So when the page loads it's unable to navigate within that page, though it does hide the secondary sections. According to the documentation I need to put the rel="external" on the form, but that is not working for me. Is it possible to get the page to load without Ajax via a form submit?
Second question in same topic. In the crawl, walk, run fashion first step is a basic mobile friendly site. But I'm hoping this can also be the foundation for a PhoneGap based version of the site. From what I understand the basic model for PhoneGap will break if pages are not always loaded in Ajax as it will trigger a browser load. Since JQM requires any page with embeded data-role=page sections to be loaded via rel=external, which turns off Ajax loading, does this mean using JQM will preclude using Phone Gap to create the native client later?
Thanks in advance for any replies.
This script below should be put between your jquery min and your jquery mobile min. Otherwise it will not take effect. Adding an extension to the $.mobile with these ajax functionalities turned off may help your issue. All 3 are not needed, but they are all test worthy for your issue.
<script>
$(document).bind('mobileinit',function(){
$.extend( $.mobile , {
ajaxFormsEnabled: false,
ajaxLinksEnabled: false,
ajaxEnabled: false
});
});
</script>
Phonegap is for building phone applications, not mobile websites. It is composed Javascript which talks to specific libraries to interface with the mobile device itself.

URL with JQuery Mobile

I am using JQuery mobile in asp.net web form website. I have the following code at the page "pageA.aspx".
View Saved Orders
When I am clicking on this link I am successfully redirected to the PageB, but the URL I am getting is
http://localhost:3244/MyFirstJQueryApp/PageA.aspx#PageB.aspx
But I want URL like this further processing, please help
http://localhost:3244/MyFirstJQueryApp/PageB.aspx
I have done it by setting target="_top" property.
Is this a good practice ?
There are a couple of mods out there (can't find the one I wanted) to remove the hash in the URL, but you have to edit the jQM framework.
You could try using the changePage() http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a4.1/#docs/api/methods.html and set the transition without tracking it in history option to true (I think it's true)
Here is some more documentation on navigation as well: http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a4.1/#docs/pages/docs-navmodel.html
mightbe able to think of another way
The idea behind jQuery Mobile is that you don't do it the way you're trying to do it! Check Dynamic pages with jQuery Mobile, which shows you how to let jQm do the work in the background by loading new data into the DOM.

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