Is it possible to dispatchEvent() a mouse click to a <input type=text> element?

Question

Basically I'm trying to dispatch a custom made mouse click event to a text input element using the following code (see this jsFiddle):

function simulateClick(id) {
    var clickEvent = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
    clickEvent.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0,
        false, false, false, false, 0, null);

    var element = document.getElementById(id);
    element.dispatchEvent(clickEvent);
}

When I run that code on a type="checkbox" element it works perfectly fine but it doesn't work at all when called on a type="text" element.

Now here's the definition of initMouseEvent() on MDN:

event.initMouseEvent(type, canBubble, cancelable, view, 
                 detail, screenX, screenY, clientX, clientY, 
                 ctrlKey, altKey, shiftKey, metaKey, 
                 button, relatedTarget);

So in the above example screenX, screenY, clientX and clientY would all be 0 (still, the above code works perfectly fine with checkboxes regardless of their position). I tried capturing a real event and passing the screen and client coordinates to the cusom made event, to no avail.

I though maybe text input elements ignore custom mouse events due to security reasons, but then element.focus() should't work either, which it does.

Any ideas or insights would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

As far as i can tell your code works fine. However it does not focus the input field as you may think, but the event is fired on the input field just fine, as seen in this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/ENvZY/

Note: the code is not crossbrowser compatible though, it fails in ie8.

Consider using a good crossbrowser library like jQuery instead of going the native DOM way - the wheel exists and works perfectly, reinventing it is a waste of time :)