What is the easiest way to disable/enable buttons and links (jQuery + Bootstrap)

Buttons

Buttons are simple to disable as disabled is a button property which is handled by the browser:

<input type="submit" class="btn" value="My Input Submit" disabled/>
<input type="button" class="btn" value="My Input Button" disabled/>
<button class="btn" disabled>My Button</button>

To disable these with a custom jQuery function, you’d simply make use of fn.extend():

// Disable function
jQuery.fn.extend({
    disable: function(state) {
        return this.each(function() {
            this.disabled = state;
        });
    }
});

// Disabled with:
$('input[type="submit"], input[type="button"], button').disable(true);

// Enabled with:
$('input[type="submit"], input[type="button"], button').disable(false);

JSFiddle disabled button and input demo.

Otherwise you’d make use of jQuery’s prop() method:

$('button').prop('disabled', true);
$('button').prop('disabled', false);

---

Anchor Tags

It’s worth noting that disabled isn’t a valid property for anchor tags. For this reason, Bootstrap uses the following styling on its .btn elements:

.btn.disabled, .btn[disabled] {
    cursor: default;
    background-image: none;
    opacity: 0.65;
    filter: alpha(opacity=65);
    -webkit-box-shadow: none;
    -moz-box-shadow: none;
    box-shadow: none;
    color: #333;
    background-color: #E6E6E6;
}

Note how the [disabled] property is targeted as well as a .disabled class. The .disabled class is what is needed to make an anchor tag appear disabled.

<a href="http://example.com" class="btn">My Link</a>

Of course, this will not prevent links from functioning when clicked. The above link will take us to http://example.com. To prevent this, we can add in a simple piece of jQuery code to target anchor tags with the disabled class to call event.preventDefault():

$('body').on('click', 'a.disabled', function(event) {
    event.preventDefault();
});

We can toggle the disabled class by using toggleClass():

jQuery.fn.extend({
    disable: function(state) {
        return this.each(function() {
            var $this = $(this);
            $this.toggleClass('disabled', state);
        });
    }
});

// Disabled with:
$('a').disable(true);

// Enabled with:
$('a').disable(false);

JSFiddle disabled link demo.

---

Combined

We can then extend the previous disable function made above to check the type of element we’re attempting to disable using is(). This way we can toggleClass() if it isn’t an input or button element, or toggle the disabled property if it is:

// Extended disable function
jQuery.fn.extend({
    disable: function(state) {
        return this.each(function() {
            var $this = $(this);
            if($this.is('input, button, textarea, select'))
              this.disabled = state;
            else
              $this.toggleClass('disabled', state);
        });
    }
});

// Disabled on all:
$('input, button, a').disable(true);

// Enabled on all:
$('input, button, a').disable(false);

Full combined JSFiddle demo.

It’s worth further noting that the above function will also work on all input types.