Until now I was using the following to disable/enable form fields -

$('#fieldid').attr('disable','disable');
$('#fieldid').removeAttr('disable');

And that got the job done. But yesterday, I absent-mindedly typed the following to enable the field -

$('#fieldid').enable();

And it worked! I silently kicked myself for not trying the the handy 'enable'/'disable' functions built into jQuery (or so I thought), and proceeded to change the line to disable to -

$('#fieldid').disable();

And to my surprise, that did NOT work.

Am I missing something? Why is the enable() function defined but the disable() function is not? And even weirder, I could find no mention of either enable() or disable() in the jquery docs. Does anyone have any explanations?

I'm using jQuery 1.6.

Until now I was using the following to disable/enable form fields -

$('#fieldid').attr('disable','disable');
$('#fieldid').removeAttr('disable');

And that got the job done. But yesterday, I absent-mindedly typed the following to enable the field -

$('#fieldid').enable();

And it worked! I silently kicked myself for not trying the the handy 'enable'/'disable' functions built into jQuery (or so I thought), and proceeded to change the line to disable to -

$('#fieldid').disable();

And to my surprise, that did NOT work.

Am I missing something? Why is the enable() function defined but the disable() function is not? And even weirder, I could find no mention of either enable() or disable() in the jquery docs. Does anyone have any explanations?

I'm using jQuery 1.6.

• javascript
• jquery

3 Answers 3

jQuery does not support an enable() method out of the box (and the disable HTML attribute does not exist either, but that might only be a typo in your question).

Maybe you're using a plug-in that provides that feature? If that's the case, try passing false to the enable() method to disable a field:

$('#fieldid').enable(false);

Looks like it's available via the disable plugin. As for why it's not included out of the box, I can only assume that it was left out as the functionality was already covered by .attr()

I have read through the jquery code and the documentation but couldn't find any indicition of am enable function, are you sure the box isn't already enabled?

I created a jsfiddle to check:

http://jsfiddle/Zy3tW/1/

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#textinput").enable();
});

<input id="textinput" type="text" disabled="disabled" />