I have an input field I want to assign a new value and fire an .onchange() event. I did the following:
document.getElementById("range").value='500';
document.getElementById("range").onchange();
Where range is my input Id.
I get the following error:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'target' of undefined
Is there a way to define the 'target'?
Thank you
The error about target
is because there's code in the event handler that's trying to read the target
property of the Event
object associated with the change event. You could try passing in an faux-Event to fool it:
var range= document.getElementById('range');
range.onchange({target: range});
or, if you can, change the handler code to use this
instead of event.target
. Unless you are using delegation (catching change events on child object from a parent, something that is troublesome for change events because IE doesn't ‘bubble’ them), the target of the change event is always going to be the element the event handler was registered on, making event.target
redundant.
If the event handler uses more properties of Event
than just target
you would need to fake more, or go for the ‘real’ browser interface to dispatching events. This will also be necessary if event listeners might be in use (addEventListener
, or attachEvent
in IE) as they won't be visible on the direct onchange
property. This is browser-dependent (fireEvent
for IE, dispatchEvent
for standards) and not available on older or more obscure browsers.
Try using fireEvent or dispatchEvent (depending on browser) to raise the event:
document.getElementById("range").value='500';
if (document.getElementById("range").fireEvent) {
document.getElementById("range").fireEvent("onclick");
} else if (document.getElementById("range").dispatchEvent) {
var clickevent=document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
clickevent.initEvent("click", true, true);
document.getElementById("range").dispatchEvent(clickevent);
}
Generally, your code should work fine. There might be something else that's issuing the problem, though.
- Where do you run those two lines?
- Are you sure that the element with the
range
id is loaded by the time you
run the code (e.g. you run it in
document.ready).
- Are you sure that
you only have one element with id
range
on the page?
- What is your
onchange()
function doing (could be
helpful to post it here)?
Apart from that, I would recommend using jQuery (if possible):
$('#range').trigger('change');
or just
$('#range').change();
http://api.jquery.com/change/
But as I mentioned, your case should work fine too: http://jehiah.cz/a/firing-javascript-events-properly
from : http://www.mail-archive.com/jquery-en@googlegroups.com/msg44887.html
Sometimes it's needed to create an
event programmatically. (Which is
different from running an event
function (triggering)
This can be done by the following fire
code
> var el=document.getElementById("ID1")
>
> fire(el,'change')
>
>
> function fire(evttype) {
> if (document.createEvent) {
> var evt = document.createEvent('HTMLEvents');
> evt.initEvent( evttype, false, false);
> el.dispatchEvent(evt);
> } else if (document.createEventObject) {
> el.fireEvent('on' + evttype);
> } } looks like this trick is not yet in jQuery, perhaps for a
> reason?
This seems to work for me (see this fiddle). Do you have any other code that may be the problem? How did you define your onchange handler?
Are you calling e.target in your onchange handler? I suspect this may be the issue... since you are doing the change programmatically, there is no corresponding window event.