Invoking Link in Javascript or jQuery

Question

I have an href taged object (graphic) on a page that I want to programatically click on. However,I can't figure out how to reference the object. Here is the tag:

<div id="getthebutton">
<div>
<a onmouseout="MM_swapImage('btn123','','http://www.comp.com/img/btn_img.png',1)" onmousedown="MM_swapImage('btn123','','http://www.comp.com/img/buttons/btn_inv.png',1)" onmouseover="MM_swapImage('btn123','','http://www.comp.com/img/buttons/btn_inv.png',1)" href="javascript:do_activity("param1", 1);">
<img id="btn123" width="180" height="60" alt="" src="http://www.comp.com/img/buttons/other_btn.png"/&gt;
</a>
</div>
</div>

How do I click on this thing? If I read this right "btn123" is just an image file.

Answer 1

To programmatically click on that you would have to do something like this

$("a").click();

Of course it helps to have an event handler assigned first, but it is really that simple :)

Answer 2

Using parentNode will give you access to the <a> tag, but I don't know if that helps you, cause I'm not sure what exactly you are doing.

document.getElementById("btn123").parentNode

I believe in jQuery, it is parent():

$('#btn123').parent()

So you could probably do:

$('#btn123').parent().click()

Answer 3

First off, you should really listen to the comments (javascript: links == dark side). That being said ...

$("div#getthebutton div a").click();

Answer 4

In this case, the anchor has a javascript href-value. Understanding that you have no control over the source, your only other option would be to evaluate the value of the HREF:

// run the href-javascript from the parent anchor
eval($("#btn123").parent().attr("href"));

Invoking a click from the code will not invoke the javascript code. As such, you must evaluate it instead.

Answer 5

If you want to get the result of clicking on the image, from the code I would say your JavaScript should simply be:

do_activity("param1", 1);

That's what ultimately happens when the image is clicked by a human. This bypasses the 'click' events, so you might miss out on some side-effects, but it's what I'd try first.