What is the functioning of fireevent() in HP QTP / UFT? - testing

Question

I am learning HP UFT.
Recently I came across fireevent and I tried to implement it on the website of Flipkart. I was trying to use firevent("onmouseover") for the link Men on the homepage of the website.
I used ChildObjects to find out the Link and WebElement (in two different tests), first Highlighted it and then used object.fireevent("onmouseover") as well as object.fireevent("OnClick"). The OnClick is working and it is showing the link as selected (i.e. the dotted box covering the link when we press tab), but it is not showing the Menu Under Men Section.
I had googled and bingged a lot. But was unable to find the exact working of FireEvent in QTP/UFT.
Please Help me solving the above problem as well as some tutorials on FireEvent.
EDIT: I am using IE 11 for testing.

Answer 1

Motti has already answered the technical definition, but I shall attempt to give you a solution to your functional issue.
In my experience .FireEvent often doesn't work as you would expect. An alternative for something like onmouseover is to simulate user behaviour a bit more closely by actually moving the mouse to the desired location. In our framework we have a little extension function to do just that, a pared-down version of which is shown here:
Sub My_MouseOver(objSender)
Dim absX : absX = objSender.GetROProperty("abs_x")
Dim absY : absY = objSender.GetROProperty("abs_y")
Dim width : width = objSender.GetROProperty("width")
Dim height : height = objSender.GetROProperty("height")
Dim x : x = (absX + (width / 2))
Dim y : y = (absY + (height / 2))
Dim deviceReplay : Set deviceReplay = CreateObject("Mercury.DeviceReplay")
deviceReplay.MouseMove x, y
Reporter.ReportEvent micDone, "A step name", "A useful step description"
End Sub
RegisterUserFunc "Link", "MouseOver", "My_MouseOver"
RegisterUserFunc "WebButton", "MouseOver", "My_MouseOver"
RegisterUserFunc "WebElement", "MouseOver", "My_MouseOver"
As an example you can then do as follows to bring up the "ELECTRONICS" menu overlay on flipkart.com (obviously substitute your own Browser and Page definitions):
Browser("Flipkart").Page("Main Nav").Link("xpath:=//a[#data-tracking-id='electronics']").MouseOver
In the original version there's various extra bits of error handling and custom reporting so it tells you what you clicked on, but the essence is the same. It locates the object on screen, calculates the centre and moves the mouse there. You might want to wait a small amount of time for the menu overlay to appear after doing so before calling .Click on one of the newly-displayed sub-elements.

Answer 2

I found a solution to my problem and it is working perfectly.
Setting.WebPackage("ReplayType") = 2
object.FireEvent "onmouseover"
Setting.WebPackage("ReplayType") = 1
In this case, the object will be:
Browser("name:=Online Shopping.*").Page("name:=Online Shopping.*").Link("innertext:=Men")
I have tried this and it is working fine. I guess, we do not need any alternatives. But I really don't know is, Ctrl+Space is not working for this in UFT. Don't know the reason.

Answer 3

This actually depends on what browser you're using.
Warning: There are exceptions to the information presented in this answer and it also may change in the future. The answer is meant to give a basic understanding but don't depend on it to be true without checking the behaviour for your specific version/use-case.
Originally QTP's FireEvent was supposed to call IE's non-standard fireEvent method.
On Firefox and Chrome this is implemented using the standard dispatchEvent. You should check which events the web site expects to get.
Things get complicated if you mix the event models (the standard DOM level 2 and Microsofts) as explained in this blog post.