Issue with Referencing an Xpages generated #Id using Bootstrap

UPDATED

I am not sure if this is a Bootstrap issue or an HTML5 issue, but there is an issue when referencing the long generated ID files in Xpages.   ID's like 'view:_id1:_id2:_id41:_id43:include1:shipper'

Today I was working on a form where the user can press a checkbox, and it will reveal additional entry fields.   I am using the features of Bootstrap to accomplish this.  It looks great and works like this:

When first loaded

With the checkbox checked

Using bootstrap, this is amazingly easy to accomplish.   The part that you want to initially hide is wrapped in a <div>  with a class="collapse in".  The collapse tells Bootstrap that this is the div you want to expand and collapse, and the "in" means that you want to start collapsed.

In the checkbox, you simply set two attributes:  data-toggle="collapse" and data-target="#the id of the div">.   That is all you have to do to make it work, really.

All went well until I changed from using a <div> to an <xp:div>.  I wanted more control over the attributes, specifically it was defaulting to "in" but I wanted to compute whether to start "out" or "in" based on whether the checkbox is already checked for existing documents.

When I started using the XSP div, I could not get it to open and close based on the checkbox.  It took me a long time of playing with the attributes using Inspect Element in Chrome to determine that Bootstrap does not like colons in ID's.

The fix is to escape your colons with a double backslash (\\) in SSJS.  When it gets to HTML, the value will be a single backslash which will escape the colon and in your id when referencing it.

This is NOT a good way of fixing this.  For a better way, see below.

I found out after I posted this that if the ID were to ever change then your code will break.   A big thanks to David Leedy who let me know that my code has potential issues.  He also pointed out to me that Marky Roden has made an excellent xsnipet for handling the unreadable colons.  

The Better Fix

1. Copy Mark Roden's xsnipet into my clientside javascript library.
2. Removed the attribute 'data-target' from your <xp:div>.
3. In my $(document).ready() function, I added the following line of jQuery  $('input.checkbox').attr('data-target', x$("#{id:shipper}").selector);

UPDATE #2: I found out that if you do a partial refresh on the page, you will lose the fix if you leave it in the document.ready() as shown above.   The fix is to move the jQuery the clientside event of you partial update.

The jQuery was easy to write.  It simply adds an attribute to the checkbox calling the x$ function which selects the <xp:div> with a name of 'shipper'.   The '.selector' property returns the ID name.  This works just the same as before but is a much better way of coding this.  (Note: that I will only have one checkbox on this page, otherwise I would have to be more specific with my jQuery selector.)

I hope this saves someone some frustration when using ID's in Bootstrap.