How can I simulate an anchor click via jquery?

Question

I have a problem with faking an anchor click via jQuery: Why does my thickbox appear the first time I click on the input button, but not the second or third time?

Here is my code:

<input onclick="$('#thickboxId').click();" type="button" value="Click me" />

<a id="thickboxId" href="myScript.php" class="thickbox" title="">Link</a>

It does always work when I click directly on the link, but not if I try to activate the thickbox via the input button. This is in FF. For Chrome it seems to work every time. Any hints?

Solution 1

Try to avoid inlining your jQuery calls like that. Put a script tag at the top of the page to bind to the click event:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
    $('#thickboxButton').click(function(){
        $('#thickboxId').click();
    });
});
</script>

<input id="thickboxButton" type="button" value="Click me">
<a id="thickboxId" href="myScript.php" class="thickbox" title="">Link</a>

Edit:

If you're trying to simulate a user physically clicking the link, then I don't believe that is possible. A workaround would be to update the button's click event to change the window.location in Javascript:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
    $('#thickboxButton').click(function(){
        window.location = $('#thickboxId').attr('href');
    });
});
</script>

Edit 2:

Now that I realize that Thickbox is a custom jQuery UI widget, I found the instructions here:

Instructions:

• Create a link element (<a href>)

• Give the link a class attribute with a value of thickbox (class="thickbox")

• In the href attribute of the link add the following anchor: #TB_inline

• In the href attribute after the #TB_inline add the following query string on to the anchor:

  ?height=300&width=300&inlineId=myOnPageContent

• Change the values of height, width, and inlineId in the query accordingly (inlineID is the ID value of the element that contains the content you would like to show in a ThickBox.

• Optionally you may add modal=true to the query string (e.g. #TB_inline?height=155&width=300&inlineId=hiddenModalContent&modal=true) so that closing a ThickBox will require calling the tb_remove() function from within the ThickBox. See the hidden modal content example, where you must click yes or no to close the ThickBox.

Solution 2

What worked for me was:

$('a.mylink')[0].click()

Solution 3

I've recently found how to trigger mouse click event via jQuery.

    <script type="text/javascript">
    var a = $('.path > .to > .element > a')[0];
    var e = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
    e.initEvent( 'click', true, true );
    a.dispatchEvent(e);
    </script>

Solution 4

this approach works on firefox, chrome and IE. hope it helps someone:

var comp = document.getElementById('yourCompId');
try { //in firefox
    comp.click();
    return;
} catch(ex) {}
try { // in chrome
    if(document.createEvent) {
        var e = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
        e.initEvent( 'click', true, true );
        comp.dispatchEvent(e);
        return;
    }
} catch(ex) {}
try { // in IE
    if(document.createEventObject) {
         var evObj = document.createEventObject();
         comp.fireEvent("onclick", evObj);
         return;
    }
} catch(ex) {}

Solution 5

Although this is very old question i found something easier to handle this task. It is jquery plugin developed by jquery UI team called simulate. you can include it after jquery and then you can do something like

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/"></a>
$('a').simulate('click');

works fine in chrome, firefox, opera and IE10.you can download it from https://github.com/eduardolundgren/jquery-simulate/blob/master/jquery.simulate.js

View more solutions

Comments

[Matt]

You're leaving out code here. There is no code associated with the click event for the anchor that you've shown us. What does that code do? Is there any other code involved?

[KyleFarris]

@Matt If you use the click method with no parameters, it is no longer interpreted as a event binding, it will actually CLICK (as if you were to click with your mouse) the element that its chained to. In this case, when the input element is clicked, the element with ID 'thickboxId' should also be clicked.

[Senseful]

@KyleFarris: The click() event doesn't work on Chrome or Safari unless the element to be clicked has an onclick event attached to it, and still will only trigger that part and not navigate to the href value. In the case above he wants it to navigate to the A tag's href property, as though the user clicked the link.

[prinzdezibel]

window.location in the click handler does not work, as then the thickbox does not work as expected.

[prinzdezibel]

Yes, I need to fake it and yes the click handler itself works. But in fact, I didn't set the onclick event at all and it works, but only the first time. But also with onclick handled in thickboxId it will not work.

[waxwing]

What I meant was to verify that the onclick in the anchor element is triggered every time you click the input element. Oh, and see my edit above.

[Jeremy]

I don't think this works in IE, at least not 7 or 8, because there doesn't appear to be a createEvent method on document.

[Jeremy]

I don't think this works in IE, at least not 7 or 8, because there doesn't appear to be a createEvent method on document.

[fregante]

I believe that document.createEventObject() should be used in IE instead, but I haven't tried it.

[Senseful]

This method causes the entire page to reload rather than simply jumping to an anchor. Additionally, it also adds the "?" to the url so the page becomes example.com?#test instead of example.com#test. Tested on Chrome and Safari.

[tokland]

As eagle says, this works in webkit browsers. But note that you are not really using jQuery here (other than the $ selection)

[sdepold]

In FF this will work nicely. In Webkit-browsers you will get urls as Senseful described. But this is no problem, isn't it?

[xusame]

@bfred.it: It seems createEventObject in IE is more for creating an event object to pass to handlers, rather than dispatching a synthetic event. IE's fireEvent may be closer to dispatchEvent, but it'll only trigger listeners -- not default browser actions. However, in IE you can just call the click method.

[daniloquio]

this is missing half of the magic: stackoverflow.com/questions/1421584/…

[mhenry1384]

Quick and dirty, but worked for me. In jQuery this is eval($("#someid").attr("href"));

[Stevanicus]

. donates that the next part is a class name. # would be for an id.

[Andrius Naruševičius]

If it is needed for an input, then use focus instead of click :)

[ChrisC]

This works for me as well, but why does this work? Why does $('a.mylink')[0].click() work but $('a.mylink').eq(0).click() does not?

[Kevin Bowersox]

In the second example it may be advisable to use .prop() instead of attr() to get the resolved url.

[ah-shiang han]

damn! why is the [0] necessary? weird that click() doesn't get trigger the other selector, what does "[0] gets the first (DOM) element" do?

[cfeduke]

[0] indicates the first element of the array - a selector returns 0 or more elements when its executed. Its unfortunate that .click() doesn't seem to work directly here since seemingly other invocations are applied to collections of elements from selectors consistently across the framework.

[Matt Fletcher]

You can also use $('a.mylink').get(0).click(); - I think it's a bit nicer this way, does the same thing though.

[Radley Sustaire]

Using [0] or .get(0) are the same. These use the DOM version of the element, instead of the jQuery version. The .click() function in this case is not the jQuery click event, but the native one.

[Oliver]

I'm surprised this is the accepted answer. The click trigger will only work on the native DOM element, not on the jQuery wrapper element. This is discussed by @Stevanicus and comments, and on several other SO posts. The answer should be changed to that of Stevanicus.

[Summer Sun]

@Schollii - feel free to edit it to your desired correctness.

[Oliver]

I meant that the accepted answer should be that of @stevanicus

[Gone Coding]

A key feature of simulate() is that it sends the jQuery events as well as triggering the native browser action. This is now the correct answer +1

[Volomike]

If doing a forced file download, this technique worked for me with Chrome and Firefox only if I made the link have target="_blank". I haven't tested in Opera, IE, Edge, or Safari yet, however. EDIT: Ah, but Chrome throws open a popup blocker if it occurs too many times!

[h0r53]

Very helpful and the better option due to cross compatibility in my opinion. I don't like having to wrap everything in try/catch blocks but I understand this is done to cascade attempts for each browser.

[John Sully]

Works like a charm and it lets me open the page in a new tab when the user clicks on a button in my kendo grid.

[Jeremy Moritz]

How did this answer get 100+ upvotes??