With the growing popularity of jquery - we have started to encounter some odd situations regarding modules that load jquery extensions - and was interesting in seeing if anyone has come up with viable ways to deal with the issues of duplication and multiple loading of extensions.

There are 2 key issues that we are seeing.

1.  Two modules both require the same jquery extension -  say fancybox  - and are both on the same page.

The system attempts to load the script twice - which can result in issues if the module does not properly encase its javascript in on page loaded wrappers.

2. Two modules both requre the same jquery extension - but they have been coded against different VERSIONS with each module tries to load

Now we have more of a problem - since the two versions may declare methods that vary or collide - resulting in one or both modules now failing to run.

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Would be interested in hearing how module developers are looking at this issue - are whether there is maybe a need to a way to register jquery  extensions as a part of DNN in some way - so that 1 - the jquery plugins could be installed into a single consistent location for ALL dnn modules to consume ... and secondly a way to indicate that a module wants a specific extension to be loaded onto the current page.

Westa 

Hi

We can follow this to avoid jquery conflicts:
http://www.dnngarden.com/Avoiding-jQuery-conflicts-in-DotNetNuke-modules.T129.aspx?EntryId=5

Thanks
Sibabrata Dash
Mindfire Solutions

I've experienced an other problem with jquery and DNN:

I've build a module which uses jQuery.  It can't include it's own jQuery as it collides with DNN's. So I don't include jQuery and use the one DNN already includes.

There are 3 problems with that approach:

1) DNN 7.0 used a pretty old version of jQuery. They recently (DNN7.1) included a newer jQuery, which was a huge jump in jQuery version and because the people at jQuery don't seem to care much about backwards compatibility, this broke a lot.

2) I can't upgrade DNN without the risk of having to upgrade my module also. Uncontrolled jquery upgrades aren't fun.

3) When DNN doesn't use jQuery itself (for example when popups are disabled) it doesn't include jQuery either, again breaking my module.

My preference is to avoid jQuery completely. It's almost always overkill to use, it has some bad UI concepts in it, but because they are provided, people seems to want to use them (adding slow animations everywhere, just because animations are cool??), readability of the code is a problem (who came up with the idea that writing everything as short as possible would be a good plan?), backwards compatibility, both between jquery versions and gracefull degradation for browsers without javascript) is a big problem,  and of course there are the collisions with other jquery instances as soon as your site becomes a little more complex.

I did save some time building the initial module, but I've spent way more time on fixing jquery issues ever since (and I've still not fixed them all)