Automated events prevent links from opening

[pavish]

We have automated events enabled in our website mathesar.org.

I noticed that the anchor buttons don't seem to perform navigation on our site in UAE, where I'm currently residing. This is because the click events are prevented, and the navigation is assigned to a callback which happens only when the event is sent i.e when the image 'simple.gif' loads or if an error is thrown, both of which don't seem to be triggering the callback.

Here's an issue in our repo with more details: mathesar-foundation/mathesar-website#127

Update:

Strike my initial reasoning, I went through the auto-events code and found this:

      var callback = function () {
        if (!sent && !element.hasAttribute("target"))
          document.location = element.getAttribute("href");
        sent = true;
      };

The anchor links in our site, had target attributes for _self.

<a ... target="_self" href="...">

This prevented the callback from being called, since they had a target attribute.

And since the onClick event returns false, chrome did not navigate to the href. Somehow, some versions of Firefox seemed to work.

[adriaandotcom]

Thanks! Is it expected behaviour to always return true for these onClick handlers?

We can fix this in two ways:

1. Return true for Simple Analytics' onClick handler
2. Test for if (!sent && element.getAttribute("target") !== "_blank")

What do you think is best?

[pavish]

My opinion on this:

1. Do not return false as this would prevent the browser from doing it's default action.
2. Do not have the redirection logic in the callback. Infact, the entire callback function below is not required.

    var callback = function () {
       if (!sent && !element.hasAttribute("target"))
         document.location = element.getAttribute("href");
       sent = true;
     };
   

The window.saAutomatedLink function would be called first and the analytics request would be sent (call for loading the simple.gif) before the browser handles the redirection.

The sites using auto-events don't really have to wait for the callback to be completed.