Don’t know if anyone else has had to do this, and it seems so simple, but it took me a couple of minutes to find this. I have a ColdFusion page with a lot of jQuery magic happening with a popup dialog that allows the user to edit address information. This dialog has a list of countries that, once one is selected, will perform an AJAX call to get a list of states for the country, and adjust the state select box accordingly.

In a situation where I wanted the user to click Edit, I perform an AJAX call to get the address information. I then have to populate all of the input boxes with the values from the JSON response.

$('#country').val(jsonResponse.country);

As you may or may not know if you simply set the value of the countries select box, it doesn’t fire off a change event, so the above code is not effective. After a little bit of searching and reading the jQuery documents, the following snippet of code will fire the event, and any subsequent listeners you have bound to that event will execute.

$("#country").val(jsonResponse.country);
$("#country").trigger("change");

That trigger() method fires off the actual event, and all is groovy. Happy coding!