Buttons
Buttons are simple to disable as disabled
is a button property which is handled by the browser:
<input type="submit" class="btn" value="My Input Submit" disabled/>
<input type="button" class="btn" value="My Input Button" disabled/>
<button class="btn" disabled>My Button</button>
To disable these with a custom jQuery function, you’d simply make use of fn.extend()
:
// Disable function
jQuery.fn.extend({
disable: function(state) {
return this.each(function() {
this.disabled = state;
});
}
});
// Disabled with:
$('input[type="submit"], input[type="button"], button').disable(true);
// Enabled with:
$('input[type="submit"], input[type="button"], button').disable(false);
JSFiddle disabled button and input demo.
Otherwise you’d make use of jQuery’s prop()
method:
$('button').prop('disabled', true);
$('button').prop('disabled', false);
Anchor Tags
It’s worth noting that disabled
isn’t a valid property for anchor tags. For this reason, Bootstrap uses the following styling on its .btn
elements:
.btn.disabled, .btn[disabled] {
cursor: default;
background-image: none;
opacity: 0.65;
filter: alpha(opacity=65);
-webkit-box-shadow: none;
-moz-box-shadow: none;
box-shadow: none;
color: #333;
background-color: #E6E6E6;
}
Note how the [disabled]
property is targeted as well as a .disabled
class. The .disabled
class is what is needed to make an anchor tag appear disabled.
<a href="http://example.com" class="btn">My Link</a>
Of course, this will not prevent links from functioning when clicked. The above link will take us to http://example.com. To prevent this, we can add in a simple piece of jQuery code to target anchor tags with the disabled
class to call event.preventDefault()
:
$('body').on('click', 'a.disabled', function(event) {
event.preventDefault();
});
We can toggle the disabled
class by using toggleClass()
:
jQuery.fn.extend({
disable: function(state) {
return this.each(function() {
var $this = $(this);
$this.toggleClass('disabled', state);
});
}
});
// Disabled with:
$('a').disable(true);
// Enabled with:
$('a').disable(false);
JSFiddle disabled link demo.
Combined
We can then extend the previous disable function made above to check the type of element we’re attempting to disable using is()
. This way we can toggleClass()
if it isn’t an input
or button
element, or toggle the disabled
property if it is:
// Extended disable function
jQuery.fn.extend({
disable: function(state) {
return this.each(function() {
var $this = $(this);
if($this.is('input, button, textarea, select'))
this.disabled = state;
else
$this.toggleClass('disabled', state);
});
}
});
// Disabled on all:
$('input, button, a').disable(true);
// Enabled on all:
$('input, button, a').disable(false);
Full combined JSFiddle demo.
It’s worth further noting that the above function will also work on all input types.