How to Automatically Close Alerts using Twitter Bootstrap

I'm using twitter's bootstrap CSS framework (which is fantastic). For some messages to users I am displaying them using the alerts Javascript JS and CSS.

For those interested, it can be found here: http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#alerts

My issue is this; after I've displayed an alert to a user I'd like it to just go away after some time interval. Based on twitter's docs and the code I've looked through it looks like this is not baked in:

• My first question is a request for confirmation that this is indeed NOT baked into Bootstrap
• Secondly, how can I achieve this behavior?

Calling window.setTimeout(function, delay) will allow you to accomplish this. Here's an example that will automatically close the alert 2 seconds (or 2000 milliseconds) after it is displayed.

$(".alert-message").alert();
window.setTimeout(function() { $(".alert-message").alert('close'); }, 2000);

If you want to wrap it in a nifty function you could do this.

function createAutoClosingAlert(selector, delay) {
   var alert = $(selector).alert();
   window.setTimeout(function() { alert.alert('close') }, delay);
}

Then you could use it like so...

createAutoClosingAlert(".alert-message", 2000);

I am certain there are more elegant ways to accomplish this.

I could not get it to work with alert.('close') either.

However I am using this and it works a treat! The alert will fade away after 5 seconds, and once gone, the content below it will slide up to its natural position.

window.setTimeout(function() {
    $(".alert-message").fadeTo(500, 0).slideUp(500, function(){
        $(this).remove(); 
    });
}, 5000);

I had this same issue when trying to handle popping alerts and fading them. I searched around various places and found this to be my solution. Adding and removing the 'in' class fixed my issue.

window.setTimeout(function() { // hide alert message
    $("#alert_message").removeClass('in'); 

}, 5000);

When using .remove() and similarly the .alert('close') solution I seemed to hit an issue with the alert being removed from the document, so if I wanted to use the same alert div again I was unable to. This solution means the alert is reusable without refreshing the page. (I was using aJax to submit a form and present feedback to the user)

    $('#Some_Button_Or_Event_Here').click(function () { // Show alert message
        $('#alert_message').addClass('in'); 
    });