force safari iOS select component to update when options change

Question

When you tap on a select input on a web page using iOS (iPhone), a spinner widget (the "picker") pops up and lets you spin through and select options within that select. Let's say you've tapped into one of these and the selector widget is open. While this is open, if you use javascript to modify the select options (add, remove, update options via the dom), then these changes don't get reflected in the widget unless the user closes and reopens the widget.

Is there a way to force the browser to update the options automatically?

Edit: Here is an example you can use to observe how updating select options doesn't update the selector widget: http://jsfiddle.net/RrsNk/

<select id="my-select" />

$(function () {
    updateSelect();
});

function updateSelect() {
    $("#my-select").empty();
    for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        var ran = Math.random();
        $("<option />").attr("value", ran).html(ran).appendTo("#my-select");
    }
    setTimeout(updateSelect, 2000);
}

Answer 1

Safari uses a UIPickerView to display the dropdown menus. As you would expect, the title of the dropdown component in the page is updated according to the changes in the DOM but the picker view is not tightly coupled with the DOM so it isn't updated. The situation is the same with Chrome and Opera Mini.

So in conclusion, it is not possible what you are trying to implement. You should look for other ways to make your dataset accessible.