jQuery Mobile - Dialogs without changing hash - dialog

Question

I have a search dialog that I am popping up and filling with jquery templates. After they make a selection I set a value on the current page. As such I don't need hashTags or anything like that, I just need a pop-up dialog that I can open and close programatically. I am currently opening the dialog with
$.mobile.changePage(dialog, { transition: "slide", changeHash: false });
and closing it with
dialog.dialog('close');
However, in certain cases (when the page is navigated to), closing the dialog refreshes the current page.
Is there a better way to interact with this?
Update:
I think I figured out what is going on. So for some reason, jquery mobile usually keeps 2 pages loaded on the DOM - one of which is invisible, you can verify this by running $('[data-role=page]') in the console. One page is the page you're on, the other is the page that you initially navigated to. Not quite sure why they choose to do that, but there you have it.
So they treat dialogs as a page navigation with a different transition even if the dialog is already in the DOM. Therefore, if you go directly to the page and then trigger a dialog, modifying the current page and closing it works fine - because the original page is always loaded in the DOM. However if you go to another page, than navigate to the page that triggers the dialog, and THEN trigger the dialog it destroys the current page so that the pages in the DOM are the initial one and the dialog. In that case it reloads that dialog-launching page entirely and you never get a chance to make any modifications.
Jeez. How do I interact with the jqm dialog widget directly?

Answer 1

You can try two other things. Both should work:
1 set DomChache
How about overriding JQM to keep the page your are firing the dialog from in the DOM? The docs say you can set data-dom-chache and override cleaning the page from the DOM.
If it only happens when you load this page in via AJAX (vs. loading it directly) you could make DOM-keeping dependend on your trigger page having data-page-external, assign DOM-chache="true" only when the dialog is openend and remove it again once the dialog is closed.
2 override JQM
I had the same problem you described and got it to work like this (requires hacking into JQM though...):
// inside transitionPages function
if ( !$(toPage).jqmData('internal-page')
{fromPage.data( "page" )._trigger( "hide", null, { nextPage: toPage } );}
}
My problem was that pagechanging to certain pages (same as dialog) caused the preceding page (where the dialog fired from) to be removed from the DOM, so I had a blank screen (when trying to go back). I added data-internal-page="true" to the pages, which should keep the preceding page intact and added the if-clause in JQM.
So now pageHide (and DOMcleanup) only fires, if I'm not going to a page labelled with data-internal-page="true"
Cheers!

Answer 2

I think I was having a similar problem. What I wanted to do was based on certain parameters, pop a dialog window on load (with that content on the same page), which they can close and view the page that loaded.
I could get it to pop on load using load, or the pageshow events, but when I clicked close that sent you back to the previous page in history, instead of just closing the dialog.
//target your 1st page content, here its id=success
//the modal content is in a page id=dialog and data-role="dialog"
$('#success').live('pageshow',function(){
window.setTimeout(function(){
$.mobile.changePage('#dialog','pop',false,false);
},1);
}
Its a hack, and just allows the page load to beat the dialog so it gets stuck in history. Then the default dialog close behavior for the dialog works as expected. Talk about a PITA, if they took a little more for the JQuery UI dialog it would have made things a ton easier.

Answer 3

And regarding your question: Have you looked at Jquery Mobile Actionsheet plugin
If you don't really require a page to be loaded, that should be ok.
Also helpful could be Cagintranet iPad popover, although you have to tweak the design to be fullscreen on mobile devices. If you require CSS/Jquery to do that let me know (I'm using this in a JQM plugin I'm writing)
Hope that helps.