Trigger Events From Firefox Browser Extension?

I want to trigger events from a Firefox extension, specifically click events. I've tried jQuery's .click() as well as the whole: var evt = document.createEvent('HTMLEvents'); evt

Solution 1:

First of all, for click events, you need to create an event object with type MouseEvents, not HTMLEvents, and use event.initMouseEvent instead of event.initEvent.

To access the document of the current tab of Firefox from a XUL overlay, you can use the content.document property, but since you already have access to the DOM element you want to click, you can use the Node.ownerDocument property, which will refer to the top-level document object for this node.

I have made a simple function to simulate MouseEvents:

function triggerMouseEvent(element, eventName, userOptions) {
  var options = { // defaults
    clientX: 0, clientY: 0, button: 0,
    ctrlKey: false, altKey: false, shiftKey: false,
    metaKey: false, bubbles: true, cancelable: true// create event object:
  }, event = element.ownerDocument.createEvent("MouseEvents");

  if (!/^(?:click|mouse(?:down|up|over|move|out))$/.test(eventName)) {
    thrownew Error("Only MouseEvents supported");
  }

  if (typeof userOptions != 'undefined'){ // set the userOptionsfor (var prop in userOptions) {
      if (userOptions.hasOwnProperty(prop))
        options[prop] = userOptions[prop];
    }
  }
  // initialize the event objectevent.initMouseEvent(eventName, options.bubbles, options.cancelable,
                       element.ownerDocument.defaultView,  options.button,
                       options.clientX, options.clientY, options.clientX,
                       options.clientY, options.ctrlKey, options.altKey,
                       options.shiftKey, options.metaKey, options.button,
                       element);
  // dispatch!
  element.dispatchEvent(event);
}

Usage:

triggerMouseEvent(element, 'click');

Check a test usage here.

You can pass also an object as the third argument, if you want to change the values of the event object properties.