Delaying a jquery script until everything else has loaded

Question

I have a jquery script which I need to run only once everything else on the page, including some other javascripts (over which I have no control) have finished doing their thing.

I though perhaps there was an alternative to $(document).ready but I haven't been able to find it.

Answer 1

Have you tried loading all the initialization functions using the $().ready, running the jQuery function you wanted last?

Perhaps you can use setTimeout() on the $().ready function you wanted to run, calling the functionality you wanted to load.

Or, use setInterval() and have the interval check to see if all the other load functions have completed (store the status in a boolean variable). When conditions are met, you could cancel the interval and run the load function.

Answer 2

You can have $(document).ready() multiple times in a page. The code gets run in the sequence in which it appears.

You can use the $(window).load() event for your code since this happens after the page is fully loaded and all the code in the various $(document).ready() handlers have finished running.

$(window).load(function(){
  //your code here
});

Answer 3

From here:

// Add jQuery 
var GM_JQ = document.createElement('script'); 
GM_JQ.src = 'http://jquery.com/src/jquery-latest.js';
GM_JQ.type = 'text/javascript'; 
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_JQ); 

// Check if jQuery's loaded 
function GM_wait() 
{ 
    if(typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery == 'undefined') 
    { 
        window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100); 
    } 
    else 
    { 
        $ = unsafeWindow.jQuery; 
        letsJQuery(); 
    } 
} 

GM_wait(); 

// All your GM code must be inside this function 
function letsJQuery() 
{
    // Do your jQuery stuff in here    
}

This will wait until jQuery is loaded to use it, but you can use the same concept, setting variables in your other scripts (or checking them if they're not your script) to wait until they're loaded to use them.

For example, on my site, I use this for asynchronous JS loading and waiting until they're finished before doing anything with them using jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"> 
    function js(url){
        s = document.createElement("script");
        s.type = "text/javascript";
        s.src = url;
        document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(s);
    }    

    js("/js/jquery-ui.js");
    js("/js/jrails.js");
    js("/js/jquery.jgrowl-min.js");
    js("/js/jquery.scrollTo-min.js");
    js("/js/jquery.corner-min.js");
    js("/js/jquery.cookie-min.js");
    js("/js/application-min.js");

    function JS_wait() {
        if (typeof $.cookie == 'undefined' || // set in jquery.cookie-min.js
            typeof getLastViewedAnchor == 'undefined' || // set in application-min.js
            typeof getLastViewedArchive == 'undefined' || // set in application-min.js 
            typeof getAntiSpamValue == 'undefined') // set in application-min.js
        { 
            window.setTimeout(JS_wait, 100); 
        }
        else 
        { 
            JS_ready(); 
        }
    }

    function JS_ready() {
        // snipped
    };

    $(document).ready(JS_wait);
</script>

Answer 4

It turns out that because of a peculiar mixture of javascript frameworks that I needed to initiate the script using an event listener provide by one of the other frameworks.