If an onfocus event handler is added with attachEvent, how can I access it?

Question

Background:

I'm writing a script (in VBA, if that matters) to input data into a web-based system. Some of the system's validation is only run when a field is focused, so I've been calling .Focus on the fields in VBA to force it to run. But that steals the systemwide focus; rather annoying if I am doing anything else while the job is running.

I want the validation to be triggered without stealing the focus. So I am trying to directly call whatever event handler is registered to the input field.

Problem:

All event handlers in the web app are added with element.attachEvent(), which means the onfocus and onblur properties (which I believe are the ones I want) are not set.
Is there any way to retrieve the handlers without resorting to even more evil hacks?

Alternatively, is there a better way to do this without having to find the event handlers? I'm pretty new to JavaScript, so I could easily be missing something.

---

Edit: Is there any other reason the focus might be stolen by the VBA code? I cannot find any other references to .Focus or even AutoIt's WinActivate, but even with the suggestions here, the problem still occurs.

Answer 1

The whole VBA part aside, you appear to have a reference to an element, so you can try calling element.focus() or element.blur() to trigger the focus and blur events respectively.

Answer 2

Take a look at this post.

This function should fire the event for you:

function fireEvent(element,event){
    if (document.createEventObject){
        // dispatch for IE
        var evt = document.createEventObject();
        return element.fireEvent('on'+event,evt)
    }
    else{
        // dispatch for firefox + others
        var evt = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
        evt.initEvent(event, true, true ); // event type,bubbling,cancelable
        return !element.dispatchEvent(evt);
    }
}

Do you have access to the application you are interacting with (to be able to add this function)?