Maurice Snip

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Archive for the ‘Cross browser’ Category

Manually firing an event the cross browser way

Posted by Maurice Snip on December 2nd, 2008

In a recent project I needed a way to manually fire an event that works in all major browsers on the market today. Since Internet Explorer and Firefox, Safari use a different event model, feature detection is needed. Where the document.createEvent block executes the code for Firefox, Safari, etc, the document.createEventObject executes the code for Internet Explorer. The function:

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/**
 * Manually fires the given event
 * 
 * @param {Mixed} el The element object or element ID that has to fire the event
 * @param {String} set The event set used, eg. HTMLEvents or MouseEvents
 * @param {String} type The event type to fire, eg. change or click
 */
function fireEventXB(el, set, type) {
	if(typeof el == 'string') {
		el = document.getElementById(el);
	}
	if(document.createEvent) {
		var evObj = document.createEvent(set);
		evObj.initEvent(type, true, false);
		el.dispatchEvent(evObj);
	}
	else if(document.createEventObject) {
		el.fireEvent('on' + type);
	}
}

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