Focusing a Textfield after It's Been Inserted

You have an Ember.TextField instance that you would like become focused after it's been inserted.

Subclass Ember.TextField and define a method marked with .on('didInsertElement'). Inside this method apply focus to the text field by accessing the component's jQuery $ property:

export default Ember.TextField.extend({
  becomeFocused: function() {
    this.$().focus();
  }.on('didInsertElement')
});

For the component's template:

Focus Input component!

{{focus-input}}

Custom components provide a way to extend native HTML elements with new behavior like autofocusing.

Our App.FocusInputComponent is an extension of the Ember.TextField component with a becomeFocused method added. After it is added to the DOM, every component in Ember.js has access to an underlying jQuery object. This object wraps the component's element and provides a unified, cross-browser interface for DOM manipulations like triggering focus.

Because we can only work with these DOM features once an Ember.js component has been added to the DOM we need to wait for this event to occur. Component's have a didInsertElement event that is triggered when the component has been added to the DOM.

By default Ember.js extends the native Function.prototype object to include a number of additional functions, the on function among them. on gives us a declarative syntax for signify that a method should be called when a specific event has fired. In this case, we want to call our new becomeFocused method when the didInsertElement is fired for an instance of our component.

Prototype extension can be disabled by setting the Ember.EXTEND_PROTOTYPES property to false.