simulate and dispatch touch event

Question

I have loaded a HTML page (say it has a text and a button at the end of the page to share the text) inside a WebView.

The thing is i want to simulate the touch event of that share button and dispatch it to webview. That is (once the user spends some time in reading the text i would like to simulate the share button click (onClick method should be called) in an automated fashion so that even if user doesn't click share i have made it mandatory to be shared.

That's the logic. I refereed to some questions reg touch events in Stack Overflow and found that dispatchTouchEvent and MotionEvent should be used but not clear how to use them and apply my logic.

It would be really helpful if someone could explain its usage with respect to the above quoted idea in a detailed manner.

Answer 1

This is possible if you know the x,y coordinates where to click.
in this java example (not mine) it shows that given a rectangle of a DOM element, it will simulate a click:
The advantage here is that you can simulate the click even if the user didnt initiate an action (which is restricted by the browser itself)
https://github.com/46cl/cordova-android-focus-plugin/blob/master/src/android/Focus.java This is a cordova example. See here for an example on how to call it from a regular android program:
Android Webview: Execution of javascript from java method called from javascript

runOnUiThread(new Runnable() { public void run() { final long uMillis = SystemClock.uptimeMillis(); webView.dispatchTouchEvent(MotionEvent.obtain(uMillis, uMillis, MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN, centerLeft, centerTop, 0)); webView.dispatchTouchEvent(MotionEvent.obtain(uMillis, uMillis, MotionEvent.ACTION_UP, centerLeft, centerTop, 0)); } });

you would need to dispatch the call from your javascript passing the rect to your java code:
here is an example (of a cordova app) calling the java method from javascript:
https://github.com/46cl/cordova-android-focus-plugin/blob/master/www/focus.js