Question

I want to record the element (element id or xpath) that the user clicks on, for example if its a href it records the xpath or id or text. How can I do this with javascript?

What i have:
click:

function recordClick() {
        var a = document.location
        alert("you just clicked on the page"+ a);
}

function onPageLoad() {
    //document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].onclick = recordClick;
        document.getElementsByTagName("html")[0].onclick = recordClick;
}

window.onload = onPageLoad;

xpath:

function createXPathFromElement(elm) { 
    var allNodes = document.getElementsByTagName('*'); 
    for (segs = []; elm && elm.nodeType == 1; elm = elm.parentNode) 
    { 
        if (elm.hasAttribute('id')) { 
                var uniqueIdCount = 0; 
                for (var n=0;n < allNodes.length;n++) { 
                    if (allNodes[n].hasAttribute('id') && allNodes[n].id == elm.id) uniqueIdCount++; 
                    if (uniqueIdCount > 1) break; 
                }; 
                if ( uniqueIdCount == 1) { 
                    segs.unshift('id("' + elm.getAttribute('id') + '")'); 
                    return segs.join('/'); 
                } else { 
                    segs.unshift(elm.localName.toLowerCase() + '[@id="' + elm.getAttribute('id') + '"]'); 
                } 
        } else if (elm.hasAttribute('class')) { 
            segs.unshift(elm.localName.toLowerCase() + '[@class="' + elm.getAttribute('class') + '"]'); 
        } else { 
            for (i = 1, sib = elm.previousSibling; sib; sib = sib.previousSibling) { 
                if (sib.localName == elm.localName)  i++; }; 
                segs.unshift(elm.localName.toLowerCase() + '[' + i + ']'); 
        }; 
    }; 
    return segs.length ? '/' + segs.join('/') : null; 
}; 

function lookupElementByXPath(path) { 
    var evaluator = new XPathEvaluator(); 
    var result = evaluator.evaluate(path, document.documentElement, null,XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null); 
    return  result.singleNodeValue; 
} 

Answer 1

listen for the click event like this

$(function() {
    $(document).click(function(e) {
       // do whatever you want to with the captured event
    });
});

​