A JavaScript Accordion to Show and Hide HTML

Build a JavaScript accordion script that lets visitors show and hide parts of an HTML Web page.

In this tutorial you learn how to create a JavaScript accordion script using the Document Object Model. What's an accordion? Click the link below to find out!

As you can see, a JavaScript accordion is a useful way to squeeze lots of page content into a small space. It consists of a list of items, of which only one is expanded at any one time. When you click on another item's heading, the first item collapses and the second item expands.

Let's see how the accordion is put together.

Creating the HTML

The first thing to do is build the markup. It's nice to keep the HTML as simple as possible, so we'll just use a div element with a class of accordionItem for each accordion item. Within each accordionItem div we'll place two elements: an h2 element for the item's title bar, and a div element for the item's content. Here's the first of the three accordion items as an example:

<div class="accordionItem">
  <h2>About accordions</h2>
  <div>
    <p>JavaScript accordions let you squeeze a lot of content into a small space in a Web page.</p>
    <p>This simple accordion degrades gracefully in browsers that don't support JavaScript or CSS.</p>
  </div>
</div>

(To add more accordion items, just create additional accordionItem divs in a similar fashion.)

Creating the CSS

The CSS in the page serves two purposes:

1. It makes the accordion look pretty and more usable.
2. It provides a .hide CSS class for hiding accordion item bodies.

Here's the CSS used in the example:

body { font-size: 80%; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; }
.accordionItem h2 { margin: 0; font-size: 1.1em; padding: 0.4em; color: #fff; background-color: #944; border-bottom: 1px solid #66d; }
.accordionItem h2:hover { cursor: pointer; }
.accordionItem div { margin: 0; padding: 1em 0.4em; background-color: #eef; border-bottom: 1px solid #66d; }
.accordionItem.hide h2 { color: #000; background-color: #88f; }
.accordionItem.hide div { display: none; }

Each CSS rule does the following:

body

This just sets a nice font and font size for the page.

.accordionItem h2

Styles the item heading inside each accordion item.

.accordionItem h2:hover

Makes the mouse cursor change to a pointer when the heading is hovered over. (Doesn't work in IE6 — no biggie.)

.accordionItem div

Styles the content div inside each accordion item.

.accordionItem.hide h2

Styles the item headings for all the collapsed items.

.accordionItem.hide div

Ensures that the bodies of the collapsed items are not shown.

Creating the JavaScript

Now comes the fun part! The basic strategy here is:

• Start by assigning a toggleItem() onclick event handler to each of the h2 accordion item headings.
• Hide all item bodies except the first, so that only the top item is visible when the page loads.
• When an item heading is clicked, toggleItem() hides all items in the list, then shows the clicked item if previously hidden. This allows the visitor to toggle any item while keeping the other items collapsed.

First you need to create a global array to hold the accordionItem divs:

    var accordionItems = new Array();

Now you need to create three functions:

• init() to set up the accordion
• toggleItem() to expand/collapse an accordion item
• getFirstChildWithTagName(), a short helper function used by init().

These functions are described below.

The init() function

The init() function is triggered by the body element's onload event:

    function init() {

      // Grab the accordion items from the page
      var divs = document.getElementsByTagName( 'div' );
      for ( var i = 0; i < divs.length; i++ ) {
        if ( divs[i].className == 'accordionItem' ) accordionItems.push( divs[i] );
      }

      // Assign onclick events to the accordion item headings
      for ( var i = 0; i < accordionItems.length; i++ ) {
        var h2 = getFirstChildWithTagName( accordionItems[i], 'H2' );
        h2.onclick = toggleItem;
      }

      // Hide all accordion item bodies except the first
      for ( var i = 1; i < accordionItems.length; i++ ) {
        accordionItems[i].className = 'accordionItem hide';
      }
    }

This function comprises 3 parts, as follows:

1. The first part pulls the accordion item divs into JavaScript DOM objects and stores the objects in the accordionItems array. To do this it first calls document.getElementsByTagName() to get a list of all divs in the page. Then it loops through this list, pushing any divs that have a class of 'accordionItem' onto the accordionItems array.

   Find out about getElementsByTagName() in Retrieving page elements via the DOM. The init() function also accesses the element.className property, which is a handy shorthand way of setting or getting an element's class attribute.

2. The second block of code goes through each accordion item div, assigning an onclick event handler function called toggleItem() to the h2 element inside the div. To locate the h2 element it calls a helper function, getFirstChildWithTagName() (described in a moment).
3. The third chunk of code loops through all the accordion items except the first, setting each div's class to 'accordionItem hide'. Due to the CSS in the page, this has the effect of hiding each item's content div, as well as giving each item's h2 heading an "unselected" style.

Register the init() function as the body element's onload event handler, like this:

  <body onload="init()">

This causes init() to run when the page loads.

The toggleItem() function

The toggleItem() event handler is called when an accordion item's heading is clicked on. It deals with the showing and hiding of the accordion items:

    function toggleItem() {
      var itemClass = this.parentNode.className;

      // Hide all items
      for ( var i = 0; i < accordionItems.length; i++ ) {
        accordionItems[i].className = 'accordionItem hide';
      }

      // Show this item if it was previously hidden
      if ( itemClass == 'accordionItem hide' ) {
        this.parentNode.className = 'accordionItem';

      }
    }

The function:

1. Stores the current CSS class of the accordion item whose heading was clicked in an itemClass string variable to refer to later.
2. Loops through all the accordion items, hiding them by setting their class to 'accordionItem hide'.
3. Shows the clicked item if its previous class was 'accordionItem hide' — that is, if it was previously hidden. This provides the toggling mechanism. To show the item it simply sets its CSS class to 'accordionItem' instead of 'accordionItem hide'.

Notice that, in an event handler function, this refers to the object that triggered the event (in this case the item heading that was clicked on).

The getFirstChildWithTagName() function

Nearly finished! You just need to create a small helper function, getFirstChildWithTagName(), that retrieves the first child of a specified element that matches a specified tag name. This function is used by init() to retrieve the first h2 element inside each accordionItem div element.

    function getFirstChildWithTagName( element, tagName ) {
      for ( var i = 0; i < element.childNodes.length; i++ ) {
        if ( element.childNodes[i].nodeName == tagName ) return element.childNodes[i];
      }
    }

The function is very simple. It loops through each of the child nodes of the supplied element until it finds a node with the supplied tag name. When it finds such a node, it returns it.

Find out about the childNodes and nodeName properties in Looking inside DOM page elements.

Putting it all together

That's all there is to building a JavaScript accordion! Take a look at the demo again, and view the page source to see how the HTML, CSS and JavaScript come together to make the accordion.

Related articles

• JavaScript Tabs - Create Tabbed Web Pages Easily
• Changing Page Elements with the DOM
• Looking Inside DOM Page Elements
• Retrieving Page Elements via the DOM
• Introducing the JavaScript DOM

Responses to this article

4 responses (oldest first):

      // Hide all accordion item bodies except the first
      for ( var i = 1; i < accordionItems.length; i++ ) {
        accordionItems[i].className = 'accordionItem hide';
      }

      // Hide all accordion item bodies except one
      for ( var i = 0; i < accordionItems.length; i++ ) {
        if ( i != 2 ) accordionItems[i].className = 'accordionItem hide';
      }

You're welcome. Feel free to ask if you need any more help.

Cheers,
Matt

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