Clickout-Event
Provides universal support for clickout and other similar events to any front-end frameworks.
There are many packages that are designed to capture and handle the
"click outside" event of an element. Some of them target vanilla JavaScript,
while some others target specific front-end framework, possibly specific version.
Front-end designers in the past had to look for the right package that works
for their particular scenario.
Look no further! Introducing Clickout-Event,
a package that provides universal support for clickout and other similar events.
It works in all scenarios: plain HTML onclickout attributes,
.addEventListener('clickout') of vanilla JavaScript,
.on('clickout') of jQuery, v-on:clickout directives of Vue.js, you name it.
As long as a front-end framework internally uses addEventListener to handle events,
Clickout-Event works for it.
License
MIT License
Requirement
In order to fully implement all native event behaviors,
Clickout-Event uses the mutation observer API,
so it will not work directly for legacy browsers.
You may try using polyfills to make it work,
but I haven't tested those yet.
Install (with module)
You can get Clickout-Event as an NPM package by running:
npm install clickout-event --save
Then add one of the following lines to your entry script:
require('clickout-event');
// or
import 'clickout-event';
And watch the magic happen.
Install (without module)
Simply download clickout-event.js.
Then all you need to do is add the script tag anywhere (as long as it is before any calling of the addEventListener method, such as the beginning of the <head> section) in your HTML file:
<script src="clickout-event.js"></script>
API
Clickout-Event provides the corresponding "out-events" for the following events: click, dblclick, mousedown, mouseup, touchstart, touchend, pointerdown and pointerup. The corresponding events are then called clickout, dblclickout etc. You can then use them the same way you use any other events; see examples below.
Note that pointer events is not supported in Safari.
With each out-event, you can use event.relatedTarget to find out exactly which element fires the original event (that is, the element being clicked etc.).
Usage
HTML inline attribute
<div onclickout="console.log('clickout detected')">...</div>
Vanilla JavaScript
document.getElementById('myId').addEventListener('clickout', myListener);
$('#myId').on('clickout', myListener);
<div v-on:clickout="open=false">...</div>
<div (clickout)="close()">...</div>
Other frameworks
Some frameworks (such as React and Blazor)
have a fixed list of events that are supported by their event attribute syntax,
so you cannot directly use their event attributes with out-events
(or with any custom events for that matter) in their templates.
Still, you can create custom components in these frameworks and use the vanilla
addEventListener() method to register event listener.
Details
Event propagation
You can have nested elements using the out-events. In that case,
unlike regular events, out-events fire in the top-down ordering;
that is, the parent element will fire the event first,
and then will the child elements.
Similarly, when calling event.stopPropagation()
(or, for example, using v-on:clickout.stop in Vue.js) on the out-events,
it will be the parent element stopping the child element from firing the event.
By design, even if the propagation of the original event is stopped,
the corresponding out-event will still fire regardlessly.
Dynamic elements
Feel free to add or remove elements dynamically!
Clickout-Event monitors changes to the document,
and will ensure the out-events work no matter which dynamic
front-end framework you're using.
Content Security Policy (CSP)
When using inline event attributes,
Clickout-Event is subject to the same CSP restriction as any other events;
that is, 'unsafe-inline' must be allowed. Now Clickout-Event uses
native mechanisms instead of eval-like methods to parse the attribute,
so you don't need to allow 'unsafe-eval'.
Caveat
Since out-events are synthetic events,
they are untrusted (that is, event.isTrusted == false) by nature,
and your event listener is not supposed to reject the event because of this.
