Marking An Item As Complete

Goals

  • Allow a user to mark an item as complete or incomplete.

  • Understand how to bind a complex event listener that requires event delegation.

  • Understand how to parse complex information from the page.

  • Understand how to make nuanced changes to the page.

Overview

In this lesson, we'll allow our users to mark items as complete and incomplete. As they do, we will ask the server to update the item's status in its database. This process will look a lot like the process for adding an item, with some additional complexity.

First off, the event listener is slightly more complex. Instead of binding a listener to a single form (like we did in the last lesson), we'll be binding a listener to every check mark in the list. jQuery's .on function allows you to do this, using event delegation.

Secondly, it will be slightly harder to get the required information from the page when the user clicks a check mark. We need to know which item they clicked, its id (so the server can identify it), and whether it has been completed or not.

And finally, we need to use jQuery to add and remove classes based on whether the item is completed. Let's get started!

Steps

Step 1

Add the following code the bottom of app.js.

$('#list').on('click', '.complete-button', function(event) {
  alert('trying to complete an item!')
})

Refresh the page and try completing an item. An alert should pop up!

Step 2

Now, we're going to get all the information we need from the page. Remove the alert from last step, and add the following code.

var item = $(event.target).parent()
var isItemCompleted = item.hasClass('completed')
var itemId = item.attr('data-id')
alert('clicked item ' + itemId + ', which has completed currently set to ' + isItemCompleted)

Try marking an item complete again. Does the alert reference the correct item and the correct completed value? Mark a few other items complete. Does it still work?

Step 3

Now that we have the necessary information, we'll make another request to the server. This is a url and type we haven't used before! What do you think it does?

Remove the alert we wrote in the last step, and replace it with the following code.

var updateRequest = $.ajax({
  type: 'PUT',
  url: "https://listalous.herokuapp.com/lists/YOUR-LIST-NAME-HERE/items/" + itemId,
  data: { completed: !isItemCompleted }
})

Refresh the page and try marking an item as complete. Check the network tab to see if a new request was made!

Step 4

Finally, we'll update the item that has been marked as incomplete or complete. Instead of creating a new item, we'll simple add or remove the class 'completed' from the specified item (using jQuery's helpful addClass and removeClass functions). This will cause the browser to render the item differently, based on the rules written in styles.css. Add this line of code after the updateRequest.

updateRequest.done(function(itemData) {
  if (itemData.completed) {
    item.addClass('completed')
  } else {
    item.removeClass('completed')
  }
})

Mark an item as complete, and see it turn gray! If you mark a completed item as incomplete, it should change colors, too.

Explanation

Here's what the bottom of app.js should now look like:

$('#list').on('click', '.complete-button', function(event) {
  var item = $(event.target).parent()
  var isItemCompleted = item.hasClass('completed')
  var itemId = item.attr('data-id')

  var updateRequest = $.ajax({
    type: 'PUT',
    url: "https://listalous.herokuapp.com/lists/YOUR-LIST-NAME-HERE/items/" + itemId,
    data: { completed: !isItemCompleted }
  })

  updateRequest.done(function(itemData) {
    if (itemData.completed) {
      item.addClass('completed')
    } else {
      item.removeClass('completed')
    }
  })
})

You've now written three ajax requests, making a modern, dynamic web page. Don't worry if you didn't understand every line of code – JavaScript is complex stuff!

There are many more features you could add (deleting items, sorting items, etc.) but in our next lesson, we'll add the most important feature: the ability of users to actually use your site!

Next Step:

Go on to Deploying Your Site

Back to Loading Items