How can I trigger a JavaScript event click

Question

I have a hyperlink in my page. I am trying to automate a number of clicks on the hyperlink for testing purposes. Is there any way you can simulate 50 clicks on the hyperlink

Answer 1

Fair warning:

element.onclick() does not behave as expected. It only runs the code within onclick="" attribute, but does not trigger default behavior.

I had similar issue with radio button not setting to checked, even though onclick custom function was running fine. Had to add radio.checked = "true"; to set it. Probably the same goes and for other elements (after a.onclick() there should be also window.location.href = "url";)

Answer 2

Performing a single click on an HTML element: Simply do element.click(). Most major browsers support this.

---

To repeat the click more than once: Add an ID to the element to uniquely select it:

<a href="#" target="_blank" id="my-link" onclick="javascript:Test('Test');">Google Chrome</a>

and call the .click() method in your JavaScript code via a for loop:

var link = document.getElementById('my-link');
for(var i = 0; i < 50; i++)
   link.click();

Answer 3

IE9+

function triggerEvent(el, type){
    var e = document.createEvent('HTMLEvents');
    e.initEvent(type, false, true);
    el.dispatchEvent(e);
}

Usage example:

var el = document.querySelector('input[type="text"]');
triggerEvent(el, 'mousedown');

Source: https://plainjs.com/javascript/events/trigger-an-event-11/

Answer 4

I'm quite ashamed that there are so many incorrect or undisclosed partial applicability.

The easiest way to do this is through Chrome or Opera (my examples will use Chrome) using the Console. Enter the following code into the console (generally in 1 line):

var l = document.getElementById('testLink');
for(var i=0; i<5; i++){
  l.click();
}

This will generate the required result

Answer 5

.click() does not work with Android (look at mozilla docs, at mobile section). You can trigger the click event with this method:

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(); 
    }
}

From this post

Answer 6

Use a testing framework

This might be helpful - http://seleniumhq.org/ - Selenium is a web application automated testing system.

You can create tests using the Firefox plugin Selenium IDE

Manual firing of events

To manually fire events the correct way you will need to use different methods for different browsers - either el.dispatchEvent or el.fireEvent where el will be your Anchor element. I believe both of these will require constructing an Event object to pass in.

The alternative, not entirely correct, quick-and-dirty way would be this:

var el = document.getElementById('anchorelementid');
el.onclick(); // Not entirely correct because your event handler will be called
              // without an Event object parameter.