Click a button programmatically - JS

Question

I\'ve seen this done in other webapps, but I\'m fairly new to Javascript and can\'t really figure this out on my own. I want to create a Google Hangout programmatically. How

Answer 1

When using JavaScript to access an HTML element, there is a good chance that the element is not on the page and therefore not in the dom as far as JavaScript is concerned, when the code to access that element runs.

This problem can occur even though you can visually see the HTML element in the browser window or have the code set to be called in the onload method.

I ran into this problem after writing code to repopulate specific div elements on a page after retrieving the cookies.

What is apparently happening is that even though the HTML has loaded and is outputted by the browser, the JavaScript code is running before the page has completed loading.

The solution to this problem which just may be a JavaScript bug, is to place the code you want to run within a timer that delays the code run by 400 milliseconds or so. You will need to test it to determine how quick you can run the code.

I also made a point to test for the element before attempting to assign values to it.

window.setTimeout(function() { if( document.getElementById("book") ) { // Code goes here }, 400 /* but after 400 ms */);

This may or may not help you solve your problem, but keep this in mind and understand that browsers do not always function as expected.