Why does an onclick property set with setAttribute fail to work in IE?

Question

Ran into this problem today, posting in case someone else has the same issue.

var execBtn = document.createElement('input'); execBtn.setAttribute("type", "button"); execBtn.setAttribute("id", "execBtn"); execBtn.setAttribute("value", "Execute"); execBtn.setAttribute("onclick", "runCommand();"); 

Turns out to get IE to run an onclick on a dynamically generated element, we can't use setAttribute. Instead, we need to set the onclick property on the object with an anonymous function wrapping the code we want to run.

execBtn.onclick = function() { runCommand() }; 

BAD IDEAS:

You can do

execBtn.setAttribute("onclick", function() { runCommand() }); 

but it will break in IE in non-standards mode according to @scunliffe.

You can't do this at all

execBtn.setAttribute("onclick", runCommand() );  

because it executes immediately, and sets the result of runCommand() to be the onClick attribute value, nor can you do

execBtn.setAttribute("onclick", runCommand); 

Answer 1

to make this work in both FF and IE you must write both ways:

     button_element.setAttribute('onclick','doSomething();'); // for FF     button_element.onclick = function() {doSomething();}; // for IE 

thanks to this post.

UPDATE: This is to demonstrate that sometimes it is necessary to use setAttribute! This method works if you need to take the original onclick attribute from the HTML and add it to the onclick event, so that it doesn't get overridden:

// get old onclick attribute var onclick = button_element.getAttribute("onclick");    // if onclick is not a function, it's not IE7, so use setAttribute if(typeof(onclick) != "function") {      button_element.setAttribute('onclick','doSomething();' + onclick); // for FF,IE8,Chrome  // if onclick is a function, use the IE7 method and call onclick() in the anonymous function } else {     button_element.onclick = function() {          doSomething();         onclick();     }; // for IE7 } 

Answer 2

There is a LARGE collection of attributes you can't set in IE using .setAttribute() which includes every inline event handler.

See here for details:

http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2007/08/bug-242-setattribute-doesnt-always-work.html