Question

I’m trying to figure out this weird issue I’ve been having, and the root cause is the difference between a live click and triggering .click().

I won’t get into the details of the problem, but basically when you click on the input button it works fine (has an onclick event). But if I call .click() from somewhere else (instead of physically clicking the button) it doesn’t work properly.

My question is – is there a way to truly replicate an actual click on a button?

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EDIT

The problem: I’m opening a new window (aspx page) that loads an inline PDF. If I actually click on the link, the window opens fine and the PDF loads. If I use .click() the window opens and I’m prompted to download the PDF file. I’ve been through Adobe Reader settings, browser settings, and registry settings about the prompting – I understand that these can be factors to the big picture, but right now I’m concerned about why the behavior between a mouse click and .click() are doing anything different at all.

Answer 1

I use this function to truly mimic a mouse click:

function clickLink(link) {
    var cancelled = false;

    if (document.createEvent) {
        var event = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
        event.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window,
            0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
            false, false, false, false,
            0, null);
        cancelled = !link.dispatchEvent(event);
    }
    else if (link.fireEvent) {
        cancelled = !link.fireEvent("onclick");
    }
}