Simulate click event on react element

I'm trying to simulate a .click() event on a React element but I can't figure out why it is not working (It's not reacting when I'm firing the event).

I would like to post a Facebook comment using only JavaScript but I'm stuck at the first step (do a .click() on div[class="UFIInputContainer"] element).

My code is:

document.querySelector('div[class="UFIInputContainer"]').click();

And here's the URL where I'm trying to do it: https://www.facebook.com/plugins/feedback.php...

P.S. I'm not experienced with React and I don't know really if this is technically possible. It's possible?

EDIT: I'm trying to do this from Chrome DevTools Console.

React tracks the mousedown and mouseup events for detecting mouse clicks, instead of the click event like most everything else. So instead of calling the click method directly or dispatching the click event, you have to dispatch the down and up events. For good measure I'm also sending the click event but I think that's unnecessary for React:

const mouseClickEvents = ['mousedown', 'click', 'mouseup'];
function simulateMouseClick(element){
  mouseClickEvents.forEach(mouseEventType =>
    element.dispatchEvent(
      new MouseEvent(mouseEventType, {
          view: window,
          bubbles: true,
          cancelable: true,
          buttons: 1
      })
    )
  );
}

var element = document.querySelector('div[class="UFIInputContainer"]');
simulateMouseClick(element);

This answer was inspired by Selenium Webdriver code.

With react 16.8 I would do it like this :

const Example = () => {
  const inputRef = React.useRef(null)
        
  return (
    <div ref={inputRef} onClick={()=> console.log('clicked')}>
      hello
    </div>
  )
}

And simply call

inputRef.current.click()

Use refs to get the element in the callback function and trigger a click using click() function.

class Example extends React.Component{
  simulateClick(e) {
    e.click()
  }
  render(){
    return <div className="UFIInputContainer"
    ref={this.simulateClick} onClick={()=> console.log('clicked')}>
      hello
      </div>
  }
}

ReactDOM.render(<Example/>, document.getElementById('app'))

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.1.0/react.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.1.0/react-dom.min.js"></script>
<div id="app"></div>

If you don't define a class in your component, and instead you only declare:

function App() { ... }

In this case you only need to set up the useRef hook and use it to point/refer to any html element and then use the reference to trigger regular dom-events.

import React, { useRef } from 'react';

function App() {
  const inputNameRef = useRef()
  const buttonNameRef = useRef()
  
  function handleKeyDown(event) {
    // This function runs when typing within the input text,
    // but will advance as desired only when Enter is pressed
    if (event.key === 'Enter') {
      // Here's exactly how you reference the button and trigger click() event,
      // using ref "buttonNameRef", even manipulate innerHTML attribute
      // (see the use of "current" property)
      buttonNameRef.current.click()
      buttonNameRef.current.innerHTML = ">>> I was forced to click!!"
    }
  }
  
  function handleButtonClick() {
    console.log('button click event triggered')
  }
  
  return (
    <div>
      <input ref={inputNameRef} type="text" onKeyDown={handleKeyDown}  autoFocus />
      <button ref={buttonNameRef} onClick={handleButtonClick}>
      Click me</button>
    </div>
  )
}

export default App;

Inspired from previous solution and using some javascript code injection it is also possibile to first inject React into the page, and then to fire a click event on that page elements.

let injc=(src,cbk) => { let script = document.createElement('script');script.src = src;document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);script.onload=()=>cbk() }
injc("https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.1.0/react.min.js",() => injc("https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.1.0/react-dom.min.js",() => {

class ReactInjected extends React.Component{
  simulateClick(e) {
    e.click()
  }
  render(){
    return <div className="UFIInputContainer"
    ref={this.simulateClick} onClick={()=> console.log('click injection')}>
      hello
      </div>
  }
}
ReactDOM.render(<ReactInjected/>, document.getElementById('app'))

} ))

<div id="app"></div>

Simulate click event on react element

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