I need more details to offer actual code, but you might want to look into Event Delegation:
Event delegation refers to the use of a single event listener on a parent object to listen for events happening on its children (or deeper descendants). Event delegation allows developers to be sparse in their application of event listeners while still reacting to events as they happen on highly specific targets. This proves to be a key strategy for maintaining high performance in event-rich web projects, where the creation of hundreds of event listeners can quickly degrade performance.
A quick, basic example:
Say you have a DIV with images, like this:
<div id="container">
<img src="happy.jpg">
<img src="sad.jpg">
<img src="laugh.jpg">
<img src="boring.jpg">
</div>
But instead of 4 images, you have 100, or 200. You want to bind a click event to images so that X action is performed when the user clicks on it. Most people's first code might look like this:
$('#container img').click(function() {
performAction(this);
});
This is going to bind a crapload of event handlers that will bog down the performance of your page. With Event Delegation, you can do something like this:
$('#container').click(function(e) {
if($(e.target)[0].nodeName.toUpperCase() == 'IMG') {
performAction(e.target);
}
});
This will only bind 1 event to the actual container, you can then figure out what was clicked by using the event's target
property and delegate accordingly. This is still kind of a pain, though, and you can actually get this significant performance improvement without doing all this by using jQuery's live
function:
$('#container img').live('click', function() {
performAction(this);
});
Hope this helps.