How to trigger event in JavaScript?

Question

I have attached an event to a text box using addEventListener. It works fine. My problem arose when I wanted to trigger the event programmatically from another

Answer 1

The most efficient way is to call the very same function that has been registered with addEventListener directly.

You can also trigger a fake event with CustomEvent and co.

Finally some elements such as <input type="file"> support a .click() method.

Answer 2

You can use fireEvent on IE 8 or lower, and W3C's dispatchEvent on most other browsers. To create the event you want to fire, you can use either createEvent or createEventObject depending on the browser.

Here is a self-explanatory piece of code (from prototype) that fires an event dataavailable on an element:

var event; // The custom event that will be created
if(document.createEvent){
    event = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
    event.initEvent("dataavailable", true, true);
    event.eventName = "dataavailable";
    element.dispatchEvent(event);
} else {
    event = document.createEventObject();
    event.eventName = "dataavailable";
    event.eventType = "dataavailable";
    element.fireEvent("on" + event.eventType, event);
}

Answer 3

I just used the following (seems to be much simpler):

element.blur();
element.focus();

In this case the event is triggered only if value was really changed just as you would trigger it by normal focus locus lost performed by user.

Answer 4

Modified @Dorian's answer to work with IE:

document.addEventListener("my_event", function(e) {
  console.log(e.detail);
});

var detail = 'Event fired';

try {

    // For modern browsers except IE:
    var event = new CustomEvent('my_event', {detail:detail});

} catch(err) {

  // If IE 11 (or 10 or 9...?) do it this way:

    // Create the event.
    var event = document.createEvent('Event');
    // Define that the event name is 'build'.
    event.initEvent('my_event', true, true);
    event.detail = detail;

}

// Dispatch/Trigger/Fire the event
document.dispatchEvent(event);

FIDDLE: https://jsfiddle.net/z6zom9d0/1/

SEE ALSO:
https://caniuse.com/#feat=customevent

Answer 5

You can use below code to fire event using Element method:

if (!Element.prototype.triggerEvent) {
    Element.prototype.triggerEvent = function (eventName) {
        var event;

        if (document.createEvent) {
            event = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
            event.initEvent(eventName, true, true);
        } else {
            event = document.createEventObject();
            event.eventType = eventName;
        }

        event.eventName = eventName;

        if (document.createEvent) {
            this.dispatchEvent(event);
        } else {
            this.fireEvent("on" + event.eventType, event);
        }
    };
}

if (!Element.prototype.triggerEvent) {
    Element.prototype.triggerEvent = function (eventName) {
        var event;

        if (document.createEvent) {
            event = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
            event.initEvent(eventName, true, true);
        } else {
            event = document.createEventObject();
            event.eventType = eventName;
        }

        event.eventName = eventName;

        if (document.createEvent) {
            this.dispatchEvent(event);
        } else {
            this.fireEvent("on" + event.eventType, event);
        }
    };
}

var input = document.getElementById("my_input");
var button = document.getElementById("my_button");

input.addEventListener('change', function (e) {
    alert('change event fired');
});
button.addEventListener('click', function (e) {
    input.value = "Bye World";
    input.triggerEvent("change");
});

<input id="my_input" type="input" value="Hellow World">
<button id="my_button">Change Input</button>

Answer 6

What you want is something like this:

document.getElementByClassName("example").click();

Using jQuery, it would be something like this:

$(".example").trigger("click");