Comments on: Keeping Track of Focus

By: ArdMan

ArdMan — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:18:03 +0000

Do you have a working example? I still can’t get the snippet above to work.
Or perhaps this isn’t intended to work in Firefox or IE 6 (that’s where I’ve tested it).

I’d love to have the ability to detect what element has focus. Unfortunately, from what I’ve read elsewhere some events don’t bubble up to the document (ie. focus, blur), but click and mouse events do.

I’d love to see this work.
Feel free to send me e-mail if that is more convenient.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:44:27 +0000

Good catch; I’ve corrected the code in the post above.

By: ArdMan

ArdMan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:39:59 +0000

I snagged this code and tried to get an example up/running to watch it work.
I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong, but (and I hate to ask)…
does this actually work?

In Firefox 2.0.0.15, I’m getting a error at “getCurrentFocus()” saying it needs a colon because it’s not a function.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:32:05 +0000

var FocusReader = Class.create({
/** cleaner code and easier to track class level vars */
currentFocus:null,

initialize: function(){
/** don’t init focus var for binding */
document.observe(“focus”, this.focusRead.bindAsEventListener(this));
},

focusRead: function(e){
this.currentFocus = e.element();
},

getCurrentFocus(){
return this.currentFocus;
},

getCurrentFocusId(){
/** consider invoking apply() or call() on the function rather then directly invoking it – picky but sometimes can be cleaner */
if(this.currentFocus.identify) return this.currentFocus.identify();
}

});