How to check if a jQuery UI plugin is attached to an element?

Question

How can I check to see if a jQuery UI plugin is attached to an element? For example, if I load up the .sortable widget, how can its presence be determined?

The purpose behind this question is that I would like the ability to toggle .sortable on elements. With the ability to see that .sortable is present, I could then call .sortable('destroy') to remove it.

Answer 1

All UI widgets have are given the class ui-widget. Typically each widget also adds the widget class to the main element. In this case you should see ui-sortable added to the sortable container.

Answer 2

All ui widgets attach their name as true to the element's container data. jqueryui also adds a data filter expression.

var $elem = $('div.sortable-container:data(sortable)');
if ($elem.length){
  // $elem contains list of elements that have sortable widget attached
}