Show Page Loading Spinner on Ajax Call in jQuery Mobile

You can use the beforeSend and complete events of $.ajax to call $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg and $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg. Would look like this:

$('#main').live('pagecreate', function(event) {
        $.ajax({
            beforeSend: function() { $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg(); }, //Show spinner
            complete: function() { $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg() }, //Hide spinner
            url: //url
            dataType: 'json',
            headers: //headers
            success: function(data) {
                //...
            }
        });
    });

Before JQM 1.2:

$(document).ajaxStart(function() {
    $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg();
});

$(document).ajaxStop(function() {
    $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg();
});

Since JQM 1.2:

$(document).ajaxStart(function() {
    $.mobile.loading('show');
});

$(document).ajaxStop(function() {
    $.mobile.loading('hide');
});

http://api.jquerymobile.com/page-loading/

A few people have asked about the workaround I ended up implementing, so I figured I'd share it. It's nothing particularly elegant or complicated, but it did seem to work. I haven't used the framework since the official 1.0 was released, so this may have been solved in the update. Essentially, I put the $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg() call into the pageshow function, but wrapped it in an if clause that only fires the first time the page is shown:

var mainloaded = false;

$('#main').live('pageshow', function(event) {   //Workaround to show page loading on initial page load
    if(!mainloaded) {
    $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg();
    }
});

$('#main').live('pagecreate', function(event) { 
    $.ajax({
        url: //url
        dataType: //datatype,
        headers: //headers
        success: function(data) {
            //
            //...loading stuff
            //
            $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg();
            mainloaded = true;
        }
        //
        //...handle error, etc.
        //
    });
});

This is a bit late...but you need to:

1. Call $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg() before the AJAX call.
2. Make the AJAX call. The call needs to be sent asynchronously (put async: true in your call).
3. Add $.mobile.hidePageLoadingMsg() in your success() function.