Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Overview of this book

Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted suite of official plug-ins for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a solid platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility and stability, and minimum time and effort. jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced. Specially revised for version 1.7 of jQuery UI, this book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy-to-follow steps. In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behavior to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the configuration options and the methods exposed by each component's API to see how these can be used to bring out the best of the library. Events play a key role in any modern web application if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by the component covered and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery UI 1.7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. Datepicker

The jQuery UI datepicker widget is probably the most refined and documented widget found in the library. It has the biggest API and probably provides the most functionality out of all the widgets. It works completely out of the box but is also highly configurable and robust.

Quite simply, the datepicker widget provides an interface that allows visitors to your site or application to select dates. Wherever a form field is required that asks for a date to be entered, the datepicker widget can be added. This means your visitors get to use an attractive, engaging widget and you get dates in the format in which you expect them. It's easy for everyone, and that's the attraction.

Additional functionality built into the datepicker includes automatic opening and closing animations along with the ability to navigate the interface of the widget using the keyboard. While holding down the Ctrl key (or Command key on the Mac), the arrows on the keyboard can be used to choose a new...