Using the GWT ClickListener on an Element

11/24/2008

GWT uses what it calls a ClickListener instead of the standard HTML onclick attribute.  The normal way to use a GWT CLickListener would be as follows:

focusWidget.addClickListener(new ClickListener() {
  public void onClick(Widget sender) {
    // do something here
  }
});

Unfortunately, this seems not to work on an HTML Element.  Luckily, you can use JSNI to write some native JavaScript and get around the problem:

/**
 * Example of adding an onlick attribute to an element.
 */
public native void addClickListener(Element element) /*-{
  element.onclick = function() {
    // do something here
    return false;
  };
}-*/;

Just be careful about what your onclick is doing in order to avoid possible memory leaks.