Simulate Mouse Over in Vimperator plugin

Question

I'm attempting to write a Vimperator plugin to allow use of hints mode to simulate mouse over on drop down menus. I have the hints mode working and can correctly choose elements that have mouseover events attached. The problem is my function to simulate the mouse over is not working. This is what I currently have:

function SimulateMouseOver(elem)
{
    var evt = elem.ownerDocument.createEvent('MouseEvents');
    evt.initMouseEvent('mouseover',true,true,
        elem.ownerDocument.defaultView,0,0,0,0,0,
        false,false,false,false,0,null);
    var canceled = !elem.dispatchEvent(evt);
    if(canceled)
        alert('Event Cancelled');
}

The above code works for some pages but not for others. For example it doesn't work on AccuWeather. Any ideas how to simulate a mouse over that will work for most pages?

Honor

Am having the same issue. The DejaClick plugin for Firefox solves this. Don't know how. – Coy

Did you ever figure this out for vimperator? – Orthography

Unfortunately no. I never could find a reliable way to get mouse overs menus to show. – Honor

Bump. Is there a way to simulate mouse over in Vimperator? @Honor did you make any progress with this? – Krystakrystal

Answer 1

here's some code to start with to create the event, simpler and works for more browsers (if you don't need to specify exact mouse coordinates)

        if( document.createEvent ) {
            var evObj = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
            evObj.initEvent( 'mouseover', true, false );
            elem.dispatchEvent(evObj);
        } else if( document.createEventObject ) {
            elem.fireEvent('onmouseover');
        }

hope that helps

Infundibuliform

just looked up vimperator, i see that it's a firefox plugin so i guess compatibility is not an issue ;) – Infundibuliform

You are write to note that compatibility isn't an issue. Unfortunately that doesn't appear to work either. I just can't understand why some website's correctly fire the mouseover event and some don't. – Honor

You may want to use initMouseEvent instead of initEvent if you need to set more mouse-specific event properties. See developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM/event.initMouseEvent – Ruble

Answer 2

In case anyone bumps into this looking for a framework agnostic way to fire any HTML and Mouse event (and set some options, if needed), have a look here: How to simulate a mouse click using JavaScript?

Nitroglycerin

Someone looking for what you linked to just bumped into this. Thanks! :) – Quin

Answer 3

You may only trigger mouseover event on fields/elements that have a mouseover event bound to them. You can't just hijack the mouse.

Anti

I know that and the only elements that match the hints are elements with a onmouseover attribute. I have checked that the element that is getting passed to the function has an onmouseover attribute that is a function. Everything looks correct except for the fact the the menu doesn't drop down on some pages. – Honor