Question:

Content injected into a page is not enhanced.

Answer:

jQuery Mobile has no way to know when you have injected content into a page. To let jQuery Mobile know you have injected content that must be enhanced, you need to either make sure the plugins are called to enhance the new elements or trigger("create") on the parent container so you don't have to call each plugin manually.

The page plugin dispatches a pageInit event, which most widgets use to auto-initialize themselves. As long as a widget plugin script is referenced, it will automatically enhance any instances of the widgets it finds on the page.

However, if you generate new markup client-side or load in content via AJAX and inject it into a page, you can trigger the create event to handle the auto-initialization for all the plugins contained within the new markup. This can be triggered on any element (even the page div itself), saving you the task of manually initializing each plugin (listview button, select, etc.).

For example, if a block of HTML markup (say a login form) was loaded in through AJAX, trigger the create event to automatically transform all the widgets it contains inputs and buttons in this case) into the enhanced versions. The code for this scenario would be:

$( ...new markup that contains widgets... ).appendTo( ".ui-page" ).trigger( "create" );

//HTML
<form id="formid">
	<input type="search" id="searchInput"/>
	<button id="submitButton">Submit</button>
</form>

// JavaScript **CORRECT**
$("#formid").trigger("create");

// JavaScript INCORRECT
$("#serchInput").trigger("create");
$("#submitButton").trigger("create");
			

Create vs. refresh: An important distinction

Note that there is an important difference between the create event and refresh method that some widgets have. The create event is suited for enhancing raw markup that contains one or more widgets. The refresh method should be used on existing (already enhanced) widgets that have been manipulated programmatically and need the UI be updated to match.

For example, if you had a page where you dynamically appended a new unordered list with data-role=listview attribute after page creation, triggering create on a parent element of that list would transform it into a listview styled widget. If more list items were then programmatically added, calling the listview’s refresh method would update just those new list items to the enhanced state and leave the existing list items untouched.

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