How to trigger event in JavaScript?

Note: the initEvent method is now deprecated. Other answers feature up-to-date and recommended practice.

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You can use fireEvent on IE 8 or lower, and W3C's dispatchEvent on most other browsers. To create the event you want to fire, you can use either createEvent or createEventObject depending on the browser.

Here is a self-explanatory piece of code (from prototype) that fires an event dataavailable on an element:

var event; // The custom event that will be created
if(document.createEvent){
    event = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
    event.initEvent("dataavailable", true, true);
    event.eventName = "dataavailable";
    element.dispatchEvent(event);
} else {
    event = document.createEventObject();
    event.eventName = "dataavailable";
    event.eventType = "dataavailable";
    element.fireEvent("on" + event.eventType, event);
}

A working example:

// Add an event listener
document.addEventListener("name-of-event", function(e) {
  console.log(e.detail); // Prints "Example of an event"
});

// Create the event
var event = new CustomEvent("name-of-event", { "detail": "Example of an event" });

// Dispatch/Trigger/Fire the event
document.dispatchEvent(event);

For older browsers polyfill and more complex examples, see MDN docs.

See support tables for EventTarget.dispatchEvent and CustomEvent.

if you use jQuery, you can simple do

$('#yourElement').trigger('customEventName', [arg0, arg1, ..., argN]);

and handle it with

$('#yourElement').on('customEventName',
   function (objectEvent, [arg0, arg1, ..., argN]){
       alert ("customEventName");
});

where "[arg0, arg1, ..., argN]" means that these args are optional.

If you don't want to use jQuery and aren't especially concerned about backwards compatibility, just use:

let element = document.getElementById(id);
element.dispatchEvent(new Event("change")); // or whatever the event type might be

See the documentation here and here.

EDIT: Depending on your setup you might want to add bubbles: true:

let element = document.getElementById(id);
element.dispatchEvent(new Event('change', { 'bubbles': true }));