[This documentation is preliminary and is subject to change.]
Fires a specified event on the object.
There are no standards that apply here.
Type: BSTR
String that specifies the name of the event to fire.
VARIANT_TRUE (true)
Event fired successfully.
VARIANT_FALSE (false)
Event was canceled.
Type: HRESULT
If this method succeeds, it returns S_OK. Otherwise, it returns an HRESULT error code.
If the event being fired cannot be canceled, fireEvent always returns VARIANT_TRUE.
Regardless of their values specified in the event object, the values of the four event properties—cancelBubble, returnValue, srcElement, and type—are automatically initialized to the values shown in the following table.
The following sample shows how to use the fireEvent method.
Code example: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/author/dhtml/refs/fireEventEX1.htm
<html> <head> <script type="text/javascript"> function fnFireEvents() { oDiv.innerText = "The cursor has moved over me!"; oButton.fireEvent("onclick"); } </script> </head> <body> <h1>fireEvent Method Sample</h1> <p>By moving the cursor over the <strong>div</strong> below, the button is clicked.</p> <div id="oDiv" onmouseover="fnFireEvents();"> Mouse over this! </div> <p><button id="oButton" onclick="this.innerText='I have been clicked!'">Button </button></p> </body> </html>
Build date: 3/14/2012
Following GMariani's tip, I attached fireEvent to a paragraph element and tested it against the all of the event names IE recognizes. For 59 of the event names, fireEvent returned true. For the following 20 events names, fireEvent returned the Invalid Argument error:
onabort onafterprint onbeforeprint onbeforeunload onbounce onchange onerror onfinish onhashchange onload onmessage onoffline ononline onreset onselect onselectionchange onstart onstop onsubmit onunload
When I used fireEvent to trigger onmouseover, it returned false.