Posts Tagged ‘checkbox’

Better Checkboxes

Another take on styling checkboxes with jQuery+CSS by Martin Angelov.

Better Check Boxes with jQuery and CSS by Martin Angelov

I’m not sure if they should really be called checkboxes at this point. I did something very similar a while ago, I called them toggle buttons.

jQuery toggle button

On most of the mobile platforms you’ve probably seen a toggle, switch-style, button used as a replacement for a checkbox. I took a stab at doing something similar in HTML, CSS and Javascript.

toggle button

You can see the final result here (it’s a pain in the ass to embed it)

Note that while I used jQuery, this is not a jQuery extension. It doesn’t use that much jQuery and I really don’t get the desire to make everything-and-the-kitchen-sink a jQuery plugin.

The button depends upon 2 images, a base, containing the design and both states of the button:

toggle button base

… and a frame (optional if you can get away with using CSS borders):

toggle button frame

(note, the middle is transparent, not white)

The HTML and CSS consists of a:

  • A div, which has the its background-image set to the base and sized to the button’s inner area, roughly half the width (in this case, plus a few pixels as some pixels were shared by both states of the button) of the base and the same height
  • A block-level anchor element within the div, which has its background-image set to the frame and sized to the same area as the frame image. The anchor allows the area to be clickable and we’ll respond to the click event that occurs on this element.
  • An input checkbox which will store the checked/unchecked state of the button.
<div style="margin:0; padding:0; background:url(base.png) -41px 1px no-repeat transparent; width:46px; height:20px;">
<a class="toggle-button" href="#" style="margin:0; padding:0; display:block; background:url(frame.png) 0 0 no-repeat transparent; width:48px; height:20px;">
<input style="display:none;" type="checkbox" />
</a>
</div>

The Javascript code to handle the click event, where the background is shifted left or right when the button’s state is toggled using jQuery’s animate function,

$('.toggle-button').click(function ()
{
if (!$('input', this).is(':checked')) {
$(
this).parent().animate({ "background-position": "0px 1px" }, "slow");
$(
'input', this).attr('checked', true);
}
else {

$(
this).parent().animate({ "background-position": "-41px 1px" }, "slow");
$(
'input', this).attr('checked', false);
}

return false;
});

This all works great, but it’s not-so-great as a reusable component, so I encapsulated the code so that I could easily transform a div, such as the one shown below, into the toggle button.

<div id="my_toggle_button"></div>

Central to this is creating a ToggleButtonFactory, which will make the button by inserting the necessary HTML/CSS code into the DOM and bind the anchor to the click event. There’s also a ToggleButton object created by the factory which will have methods to toggle the button state (.toggle) and get the state of the button (.val).

function ToggleButton(_element, _funcSelectYes, _funcSelectNo)
{
this.jqDomElement = _element;
this.funcSelectYes = _funcSelectYes;
this.funcSelectNo = _funcSelectNo;

this.val = function ()
{
return $(this.jqDomElement).find('input').is(':checked');
}

this.toggle = function (funcSelectYes, funcSelectNo)
{
if (!this.jqDomElement.find('input').is(':checked')) {
this.jqDomElement.animate({ "background-position": "0px 1px" }, "slow");
this.jqDomElement.find('input').attr('checked', true);

if (this.funcSelectYes) {
this.funcSelectYes();
}
}
else {

this.jqDomElement.animate({ "background-position": "-41px 1px" }, "slow");
this.jqDomElement.find('input').attr('checked', false);

if (this.funcSelectNo) {
this.funcSelectNo();
}
}
}
}

var ToggleButtonFactory = {};
ToggleButtonFactory.makeButton =
function (element, initialState, funcSelectYes, funcSelectNo)
{
if ($(element).is('div')) {

var elemId = $(element).attr('id');
var newDivId = '__toggle_button_div_' + Math.ceil((Math.random() * 100000));
$(element).replaceWith(
'<div id="' + newDivId + '" style="margin:0; padding:0; background:url(base.png) -41px 1px no-repeat transparent; width:46px; height:20px;"><a class="toggle-button" href="#" style="margin:0; padding:0; display:block; background:url(frame.png) 0 0 no-repeat transparent; width:48px; height:20px;"><input id="' + elemId + '" name="' + elemId + '" style="display:none;" type="checkbox" /></a></div>');

var newElem = $('#' + newDivId);
var tb = new ToggleButton(newElem, funcSelectYes, funcSelectNo);

newElem.find(
'a').click(function ()
{
tb.toggle();
return false;
});

if (initialState) {
tb.toggle();
}

return tb;
}
}

Note there’s some additional code here to deal with setting the button to an initial state and callbacks for when the button is set to the “Yes” or “No” state.

Now, to transform the my_toggle_button div shown above into a toggle button, the following is done:

var btn = ToggleButtonFactory.makeButton('#my_toggle_button', false, function () { }, function () { });

(the call can be shorter, this shows calling with all arguments and capturing the return value [the ToggleButton object])

For another take on this, see the jQuery LightSwitch plugin.