How do I programmatically click on an element in JavaScript

Question

In IE  I can just call element click   from JavaScript - how do I accomplish the same task in Firefox   Ideally I d like to have some JavaScript that would work equally well cross-browser  but if necessary I ll have different per-browser JavaScript for this

User · Answer

Using jQuery you can do exactly the same thing  for example      a   click      Which will  click  all anchors on the page

User · Answer

Are you trying to actually follow the link or trigger the onclick  You can trigger an onclick with something like this   var link   document getElementById linkId   link onclick call link

User · Answer

For firefox links appear to be  special   The only way I was able to get this working was to use the createEvent described here on MDN and call the initMouseEvent function   Even that didn t work completely  I had to manually tell the browser to open a link     var theEvent   document createEvent  MouseEvent    theEvent initMouseEvent  click   true  true  window  0  0  0  0  0  false  false  false  false  0  null   var element   document getElementById  link    element dispatchEvent theEvent    while  element        if  element tagName     A   amp  amp  element href                      if  element target      blank     window open element href  element target             else   document location   element href            element   null            else               element   element parentElement

User · Answer

element click   is a standard method outlined by the W3C DOM specification  Mozilla s Gecko Firefox follows the standard and only allows this method to be called on INPUT elements

User · Answer

I used KooiInc s function listed above but I had to use two different input types one  button  for IE and one  submit  for FireFox  I am not exactly sure why but it works      HTML   lt input type  button  id  btnEmailHidden  style  display none    gt   lt input type  submit  id  btnEmailHidden2  style  display none    gt       in JavaScript  var hiddenBtn   document getElementById  btnEmailHidden     if  hiddenBtn fireEvent        hiddenBtn fireEvent  onclick        hiddenBtn eType       else          dispatch for firefox   others     var evObj   document createEvent  MouseEvent        evObj initEvent eType  true  true       var hiddenBtn2   document getElementById  btnEmailHidden2        hiddenBtn2 dispatchEvent evObj       I have search and tried many suggestions but this is what ended up working  If I had some more time I would have liked to investigate why submit works with FF and button with IE but that would be a luxury right now so on to the next problem

User · Answer

The document createEvent documentation says that  The createEvent method is deprecated  Use event constructors instead    So you should use this method instead   var clickEvent   new MouseEvent  click          view   window       bubbles   true       cancelable   false       and fire it on an element like this   element dispatchEvent clickEvent     as shown here

User · Answer

Here s a cross browser working function  usable for other than click handlers too    function eventFire el  etype       if  el fireEvent          el fireEvent  on    etype         else         var evObj   document createEvent  Events          evObj initEvent etype  true  false         el dispatchEvent evObj

[javascript] How do I programmatically click on an element in JavaScript?

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