How do I get a jQuery UI Datepicker button inline with the input?

Question

In an MVC 5 project, with the default bootstrap layout, I am using the following code to set all inputs of a certain class to jQuery UI Datepicker widgets:

$(".jqueryui-marker-datepicker").datepicker({
    dateFormat: "yy-mm-dd",
    changeYear: true,
    showOn: "button"
}).next("button").button({
    icons: { primary: "ui-icon-calendar" },
    label: "Select a date",
    text: false
});

Here is the HTML that is rendered by Razor and jQuery UI after the above call executes, minus some aria and validation data attributes:

<div class="form-group">
    <label class="control-label col-md-2" for="Time">Date</label>
    <div class="col-md-10">
        <input class="form-control jqueryui-marker-datepicker hasDatepicker valid" id="Time" name="Time" type="text" value="2015-05-02">
        <button type="button" class="ui-datepicker-trigger ui-button ui-widget ui-state-default ui-corner-all ui-button-icon-only" role="button" title="Select a date">
            <span class="ui-button-icon-primary ui-icon ui-icon-calendar"></span><span class="ui-button-text">Select a date</span>
        </button>
        <span class="text-danger field-validation-valid" data-valmsg-for="Time" data-valmsg-replace="true"></span>
    </div>
</div>

The problem with this is that datepicker button appears below the date input. This is because the bootstrap .form-control class makes gives the input a display: block. If I edit this in Chrome's console to inline-block the button appears immediately to the right of the input, exactly where I want it.

Now I could add a new css rule as follows:

.form-control.jqueryui-marker-datepicker {
  display: inline-block;
}

but I'm just not sure if this is the neatest way to do this, with the least impact on all the layout magic that bootstrap is doing.

Solution 1

The bootstrap metaphor for displaying buttons next to inputs is to use an input-group like this:

<div class="input-group">
  <input type="date" class="form-control" placeholder="Date" />
  <span class="input-group-btn">
    <button class="btn btn-default" type="button">
        <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-calendar" ></span>
    </button>
  </span>
</div>

You can tweak your script to format the output to add these classes and html structure by wrapping the contents like this:

$(".jqueryui-marker-datepicker")
  .wrap('<div class="input-group">')
  .datepicker({
    dateFormat: "yy-mm-dd",
    changeYear: true,
    showOn: "button"
  })
  .next("button").button({
    icons: { primary: "ui-icon-calendar" },
    label: "Select a date",
    text: false
  })
  .addClass("btn btn-default")
  .wrap('<span class="input-group-btn">')
  .find('.ui-button-text')
  .css({
    'visibility': 'hidden',
    'display': 'inline'
  });

<link href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.4/jquery-ui.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<link href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/3.3.2/css/bootstrap.css" rel="stylesheet"/>

<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/3.3.2/js/bootstrap.js"></script>
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.4/jquery-ui.js"></script>

<input type="text" class="jqueryui-marker-datepicker form-control">

---

Alternative w/ Bootstrap

That being said, this is a pretty convoluted way to do this. I'd add a native bootstrap glyphicon instead of trying to force the button to display correctly. It's also pretty uncommon to mix jQuery-UI and Bootstrap as there is a lot of overlap in functionality and they don't always play nice together. I would recommend looking into just extending bootstrap with a datepicker plugin.

Here's an example using bootstrap-datepicker

$('.datepicker').datepicker({});

// 
$('.datepicer-icon').on('click', '.btn', function(e) {
  $(e.delegateTarget).find('.datepicker').focus();
});

<link href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/3.3.2/css/bootstrap.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<link href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/bootstrap-datepicker/1.3.1/css/datepicker.css" rel="stylesheet"/>

<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/3.3.2/js/bootstrap.js"></script>
<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/bootstrap-datepicker/1.3.1/js/bootstrap-datepicker.js"></script>

<div class="container" >

  <h3>With Input Group</h3>
  <div class="input-group datepicer-icon">
    <input type="text" class="form-control datepicker" placeholder="Date" />
    <span class="input-group-btn">
      <button class="btn btn-default" type="button">
        <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-calendar" ></span>
      </button>
    </span>
  </div>

  <h3>With Feedback</h3>
  <div class="form-group has-feedback">
    <input type="text" class="form-control datepicker" placeholder="Date" />
    <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-calendar form-control-feedback"></i>
  </div>

</div>

Solution 2

Try this way :

<form class="form-inline">
        <div class="form-group">
            <label class="control-label col-md-2" for="Time">Date</label>
            <div class="col-md-10">
                <input class="form-control jqueryui-marker-datepicker hasDatepicker valid" id="Time" name="Time" type="text" value="2015-05-02">
                <button type="button" class="ui-datepicker-trigger ui-button ui-widget ui-state-default ui-corner-all ui-button-icon-only" role="button" title="Select a date">
                    <span class="ui-button-icon-primary ui-icon ui-icon-calendar"></span><span class="ui-button-text">Select a date</span>
                </button>
                <span class="text-danger field-validation-valid" data-valmsg-for="Time" data-valmsg-replace="true"></span>
            </div>
        </div>
</form>

Comments

[ProfK]

Thanks for a most enlightening answer. The bootstrap datepicker seems like a much, much neater option, especially as my goal here is a turorial for asp.net mvc editor templates!

[ProfK]

Add that to what? The input already has form-control, which gives it display: block;, as mentioned in my question.

[Umair Khan]

form-control is worng answer