jQuery UI dialog form, not sending correct variable - jquery-ui

Question

I'm loading a customer info page using jQuery. There's a list of customers with a link next to it:
View
That triggers this function:
function load_customer(id) {
$("#dashboard").load('get_info/' + id);
}
That works perfectly. On the page I'm loading, I have a jQuery UI modal dialog form for adding new information.
<div id="addinfo">
<form><input type="hidden" name="customer_id" value="<?php echo $c->id; ?>" /></form>
</div>
My javascript:
$("#addinfobutton").click(function(){
$("#addinfo").dialog("open");
return false;
});
$("#addinfo").dialog({
autoOpen:false,
width:400,
height:550,
modal: true
});
When you select a customer the first time, it populates the hidden field correctly, but then it stays the same even after selecting other customers.
I thought that by loading a new customer page, the form would reset as well... but apparently it's being stored/cached somewhere. If I echo the ID anywhere else in the page, it shows correctly... just not in the "addinfo" div.
Any help/suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

JQuery dialog's dont reload the content for you when you open them. I tend to have an AJAX call replacing the content of the div that the dialog is on (or tweakng some values in it) when the dialog is opened.
If you want a hidden field, then I wouldn't put it within the dialog, you should be able to retrieve the value from outside the dialog.

Answer 2

After some more researching, it seems the dialog is being cached client-side after it's called. So to get around that, I just added the customerId to the end of the popup div's ID name... so each customer page will have a unique dialog ID.
However, if it's caching each of those dialogs, won't there be a performance loss if you open quite a few? How can you clear them without having to do a full page refresh?

Answer 3

I guess if the #addinfo div is updated it should capture the new content...anyway this would destroy the dialog after closing it to insure a new instance will be created:
$("#addinfobutton").click(function(){
openDialog('#addinfo');
return false;
});
function openDialog(elm) {
$(elm).dialog({
autoOpen:true,
width:400,
height:550,
modal: true,
close: function() {
$(this).dialog('destroy');
}
});
}