Triggering event

[Frank Lin]

I was asked this question and did not have the answer.
Question
If you have a function that handles a particular event, for example, onClick, for all buttons in a form. How do you find out which button triggers the event in your function?
Does anyone know?

[Anonymous]

It depends on the browser.
IE implicity passes an event object to any event handler and you can access its srcElement property.
Netscape doesn't pass that element implicitly, but you can force it by specifying it as a parameter to your handler. Since this doesn't hurt anything in IE, doing it this way will work in both browsers.

    <INPUT TYPE=BUTTON NAME="thing1" "onClick"="handleClicks(event)">Thing1</INPUT>
    <INPUT TYPE=BUTTON NAME="thing2" "onClick"="handleClicks(event)">Thing2</INPUT>
    <INPUT TYPE=BUTTON NAME="thing3" "onClick"="handleClicks(event)">Thing3</INPUT>

Then in your handler...

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">
        function handleClicks(eventObject)
        {
            var theSource = eventObject.srcElement
            switch(theSource.name)
            {
                case "thing1":
                    alert("Thing1 was clicked!")
                    break
                case "thing2":
                    alert("Thing2 was clicked!")
                    break
                case "thing3":
                    alert("Thing3 was clicked!")
                    break
            }
        }
    </SCRIPT>

[ February 13, 2002: Message edited by: Bodie Minster ]