427537 - Implement CustomEvent DOM3 specification

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Events, enhancement)

Description

[Aleks Totic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032620 Firefox/3.0b5
Build Identifier: 

CustomEvent is a DOM3 specification, and would make generated events a lot more powerful if implemented. We use js-generated events in XUL for TabOpen, TabClose etc. With current DOM API (createEvent/initEvent), you can't pass any arguments with the event. With CustomEvent API, an extra detail argument is allowed, making events a lot more useful. Trivial example, TabOpen could specify which tab got opened.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

DOM 3 Events is still just a *draft* and there will be changes for sure.
(For example I'm going to propose to change CustomEvent interface a bit).

On FF3 extension/chrome developers (well, also web developers could, but it 
isn't recommended) can use gecko-only nsIDOMDataContainerEvent.
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/dom/public/idl/events/nsIDOMDataContainerEvent.idl
That is actually more flexible than CustomEvent, because it may contain any
number any kind of data, identified using a string key.

var evt = document.createEvent("datacontainerevents");
evt.initEvent("SomeEventName", true, true);
evt.setData("key", "somevalue");

This bug is valid, but just shouldn't be fixed before DOM 3 Events
is a bit more stable.

Comment 2

[Aleks Totic]

Thanks for the tip about datacontainerevent. I wish I found about them earlier.

Comment 3

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

I made a workaround for until this gets fixed: https://gist.github.com/961460

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Attachment: patch

Comment 5

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/47f42f84ba96

But I managed to mess up with the hg summary.
Fortunately the bug number is there.

Comment 6

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

trevorh, CustomEvent is an Event class, not a method called document.customEvent(). I've deleted all of your documentation and I'll try to document it myself (the new page is https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM/Event/CustomEvent), though I'm not that experienced with MDN page guidelines.

Comment 7

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

Ok I think it's good now.