How to generate a right-click event in all browsers

Question

A little context:
The app I'm working on has a right-click context menu for certain objects on the screen. The current design as that each of these objects listens for a right-click, sends an AJAX request to get the context data for that object, uses that data to create a PopupMenu2 from Dojo 0.4.3 (I know!), and then generates a right-click to launch the Dojo menu.

I'm trying to figure out a way to generate a right-click event for all browsers. Currently, we only support IE and use the oncontextmenu event.

Restrictions:

• No jQuery :(
• I cannot pre-load all the data for the objects on screen to create the Dojo menu and avoid the AJAX request.

Answer 1

This should get you started with generating a right click event. The key to the right click is the button parameter: button = 2.

if (document.createEvent) {
  var rightClick = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
  rightClick.initMouseEvent(
    'click', // type
    true,    // canBubble
    true,    // cancelable
    window,  // view - set to the window object
    1,       // detail - # of mouse clicks
    10,       // screenX - the page X coordinate
    10,       // screenY - the page Y coordinate
    10,       // clientX - the window X coordinate
    10,       // clientY - the window Y coordinate
    false,   // ctrlKey
    false,   // altKey
    false,   // shiftKey
    false,   // metaKey
    2,       // button - 1 = left, 2 = right
    null     // relatedTarget
  );
  document.dispatchEvent(rightClick);
} else if (document.createEventObject) { // for IE
  var rightClick = document.createEventObject();
  rightClick.type = 'click';
  rightClick.cancelBubble = true;
  rightClick.detail = 1;
  rightClick.screenX = 10;
  rightClick.screenY = 10;
  rightClick.clientX = 10;
  rightClick.clientY = 10;
  rightClick.ctrlKey = false;
  rightClick.altKey = false;
  rightClick.shiftKey = false;
  rightClick.metaKey = false;
  rightClick.button = 2;
  document.fireEvent('onclick', rightClick);
}

I would suggest Googleing for 'document.createEvent' and 'document.createEventObject' for more detail on the API from the Mozilla and MSDN sites.

Hope this helps!