Jquery – Buttons in jquery-ui dialog box not showing when autoOpen false

I just had to solve the same problem. The key to getting this to work was that the dialog must be partially initialized in the click event handler for the link you want to use the confirmation functionality with (if you want to use this for more than one link). This is because the target URL for the link must be injected into the event handler for the confirmation button click. I used a CSS class to indicate which links should have the confirmation behavior.

Here's my solution, abstracted away to be suitable for an example.

<div id="dialog" title="Confirmation Required">
  Are you sure about this?
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function() {
    $("#dialog").dialog({
      autoOpen: false,
      modal: true
    });
  });

  $(".confirmLink").click(function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    var targetUrl = $(this).attr("href");

    $("#dialog").dialog({
      buttons : {
        "Confirm" : function() {
          window.location.href = targetUrl;
        },
        "Cancel" : function() {
          $(this).dialog("close");
        }
      }
    });

    $("#dialog").dialog("open");
  });
</script>

<a class="confirmLink" href="http://someLinkWhichRequiresConfirmation.com">Click here</a>
<a class="confirmLink" href="http://anotherSensitiveLink">Or, you could click here</a>

I believe that this would work for you, if you can generate your links with the CSS class (confirmLink, in my example).

Here is a jsfiddle with the code in it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll note that I spent a few minutes on this particular problem and I provided a similar answer to this question, which was also without an accepted answer at the time.

I have found this worked in the end (note the third line overriding the open function which find the button and hides it):

$("#div2").dialog({
    closeOnEscape: false,
    open: function(event, ui) {
        $(".ui-dialog-titlebar-close", ui.dialog || ui).hide();
    }
});

To hide the close button on all dialogs you can use the following CSS too:

.ui-dialog-titlebar-close {
    visibility: hidden;
}