Archive for November, 2011

Programatically fire crossbrowser click event with JavaScript

Posted by Erik Karlsson in JavaScript, Web development on November 29, 2011

The following function triggers a mouseclick event on the DOM-node you pass to it.
I’ve tested it with Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9, Firefox 3.x and 11 nightly. Chrome 17-dev, Opera 10 and 11, webkit on iOS 5 iPhone 4, webkit on Android 2.3.4, Safari 4.0.5 on Windows. If you need it on another browser/version/os, please test it and post the result as a comment here.

function fireClick(node){
	if ( document.createEvent ) {
		var evt = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
		evt.initEvent('click', true, false);
		node.dispatchEvent(evt);	
	} else if( document.createEventObject ) {
		node.fireEvent('onclick') ;	
	} else if (typeof node.onclick == 'function' ) {
		node.onclick();	
	}
}

Example usage:

//assumes <a href="http://www.nonobtrusive.com" id="myLink">Click me</a>
var theNode = document.getElementById('myLink');
theNode.onclick = function(){ alert("You clicked a link with href:" + this.href); };
fireClick(theNode);

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