delay JQuery effects

Question

I want to fade out an element and all its child elements after a delay of a few seconds. but I haven't found a way to specify that an effect should start after a specified time delay.

Solution 1

setTimeout(function() { $('#foo').fadeOut(); }, 5000);

The 5000 is five seconds in milliseconds.

Solution 2

I use this pause plugin I just wrote

$.fn.pause = function(duration) {
    $(this).animate({ dummy: 1 }, duration);
    return this;
};

Call it like this :

$("#mainImage").pause(5000).fadeOut();

Note: you don't need a callback.

---

Edit: You should now use the jQuery 1.4. built in delay() method. I haven't checked but I assume its more 'clever' than my plugin.

Solution 3

Previously you would do something like this

$('#foo').animate({opacity: 1},1000).fadeOut('slow');

The first animate isn't doing anything since you already have opacity 1 on the element, but it would pause for the amount of time.

In jQuery 1.4, they have built this into the framework so you don't have to use the hack like above.

$('#foo').delay(1000).fadeOut('slow');

The functionality is the same as the original jQuery.delay() plugin http://www.evanbot.com/article/jquery-delay-plugin/4

Solution 4

You can avoid using setTimeout by using the fadeTo() method, and setting a 5 second delay on that.

$("#hideAfterFiveSeconds").click(function(){
  $(this).fadeTo(5000,1,function(){
    $(this).fadeOut("slow");
  });
});

View more solutions

Comments

[Chris Marasti-Georg]

Note that this is using Javascript's built-in setTimeout function, nothing jQuery specific.

[Jason Bunting]

This only partially answers his question, I think.

[redsquare]

doing this kind of block is very cpu intensive compared to setTimeout. I don't see the advantage. - Why is avoiding the native timer necessary?

[Tormod]

This helps me so much! Thank you :-)

[aruno]

just watch out if jQuery ever adds a pause() function because there's will probably be better than mine! but its good to abstract away what youre doing like this

[aruno]

can someone explain WHY i dont need a callback? i'm not quite sure why this doesnt return immediately

[gnarf]

jQuery has a built in animation queue... if you never reset/stop the queue, the "pause" acts as period of animation that doesn't actually animate anything.

[yonran]

stop() doesn't work with delay(), so I still use your dummy animation hack. (bug bugs.jquery.com/ticket/6576 )