About

Dispatching an event means to follow the steps that propagate the event through the tree.

Firing an event is just starting the propagation (dispatch) process.

Demo: explicit dispatch with the dispatchEvent function

• The HTML code. We will execute an event against the world span.

<p>Hello <span id="world">world</span>!</p>

• Utility function to print the node id

function getNodeId(node){
  let nodeId = node.nodeName;
  if ("id" in node){
     nodeId += "#"+node.id;
  }
  return nodeId.toLowerCase();
}

• A callback function that will give as listener parameter to be executed when the event is dispatched

function eventCallback(e) {
     console.log('-------------------');
     console.log("Target: "+getNodeId(e.target));
     console.log("Current Target: "+getNodeId(e.currentTarget));
     console.log("Event Phase: "+e.eventPhase);
}

• The custom event type (ie event name)

let eventName = "myEvent";

• Add the listeners on document, body and element that executes the callback for this event

document.addEventListener(eventName , eventCallback, {capture: true});
document.body.addEventListener(eventName , eventCallback);
document.getElementById("world").addEventListener(eventName , eventCallback);

• Create the event and dispatch it against the span world element

var myEvent = new Event(eventName, {bubbles:true});
document.getElementById("world").dispatchEvent(myEvent);

• Result:

Documentation / Reference

• Credits