How can I simulate an anchor click via jquery?

Question

I have a problem with faking an anchor click via jQuery: Why does my thickbox appear the first time I click on the input button, but not the second or third time?

Here is my code:

<input onclick="$('#thickboxId').click();" type="button" value="Click me" />

<a id="thickboxId" href="myScript.php" class="thickbox" title="">Link</a>

It does always work when I click directly on the link, but not if I try to activate the thickbox via the input button. This is in FF. For Chrome it seems to work every time. Any hints?

Answer 1

Although this is very old question i found something easier to handle this task. It is jquery plugin developed by jquery UI team called simulate. you can include it after jquery and then you can do something like

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/"></a>
$('a').simulate('click');

works fine in chrome, firefox, opera and IE10.you can download it from https://github.com/eduardolundgren/jquery-simulate/blob/master/jquery.simulate.js

Answer 2

The question title says "How can I simulate an anchor click in jQuery?". Well, you can use the "trigger" or "triggerHandler" methods, like so:

<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/thickbox.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
    $('#btn').click(function() {
        $('#thickboxId').triggerHandler('click');
    })
})
</script>
...
<input id="btn" type="button" value="Click me">
<a id="thickboxId" href="myScript.php" class="thickbox" title="">Link</a>

Not tested, this actual script, but I've used trigger et al before, and they worked a'ight.

UPDATE
triggerHandler doesn't actually do what the OP wants. I think 1421968 provides the best answer to this question.

Answer 3

I believe you can use:

$('#yourLink').bind('click', function() {
  //Do something over here
});

$('#yourLink').trigger('click');

This will easily trigger the click function, without actually clicking on it.

Answer 4

What worked for me was:

$('a.mylink')[0].click()

Answer 5

You can create a form via jQuery or in the HTML page code with an action that mimics your link href:

<a id="anchor_link" href="somepath.php">click here</a>.

var link = $('#anchor_link').attr('href');
$('body').append('<form id="new_form" action="'+link+'"></form>');
$('#new_form').submit();

Answer 6

In trying to simulate a 'click' in unit tests with the jQuery UI spinner I could not get any of the previous answers to work. In particular, I was trying to simulate the 'spin' of selecting the down arrow. I looked at the jQuery UI spinner unit tests and they use the following method, which worked for me:

element.spinner( "widget" ).find( ".ui-spinner-up" ).mousedown().mouseup();