Question

I have been trying for a while now trying to figure out how to programmatically click a link using PHP and/or javascript. I have it setup so if the user clicks a link it will refresh a table. You don’t really need to know why I want to do this b/c then it will go down a whole long road of confusion. Just know that there is a link to be clicked and I really really want to programmatically click that link using PHP and/or javascript.

Is there really no way to do this?

Edit: The code where I need to put the auto-click is in PHP, which would have to create and trigger some javascript or jquery or whatever.

Edit 2: Ok, now that you’re all confused … the real problem is that I have a Drupal form that has a property set to use AJAX when submitting. So the submission is done using the jquery plugin that is a module for Drupal. The AJAX setting is just an attribute setting and I do not have access to the underlying code that goes along with the submission of the form. Which forces me to have to refresh the table after the button is clicked. I really wish I could just attach the refreshing to the button click event for the submit of the form. But since I don’t have access to that code I don’t believe it’s possible.

Answer 1

With Javascript, you can since it runs on the client machine, where the link exists. But the link doesn’t even exist when PHP is doing it’s magic, so you cannot click it “with” PHP. Keep in mind that PHP runs on the server, but the link exists only on the client.

Click a link with Javascript is rather simple:

// <a href="index.php" id="mylink">Index Page</a>
document.getElementById("mylink").click();

Make sure all of your values are spelled properly. You can even output this command from PHP:

    <?php print "<script type='text/javascript'>
                   document.getElementById('myLink').click();
                 </script>"; ?>
  </body>
</html>

Note I placed this just before the closing </body> tag to ensure the link is present on the page.