Empty Onclick and href in Anchor tag

Question

I have two questions.

1) when I click on a link, I got an html page as response. Looking at the page source I can see CASE 1 but when I inspect element i see CASE 2

I dont understand why this happens. Can someone tell me what could be the reason ?

2) when I click on the refresh icon ( which is created by the code above), i am not redirected to link mentioned in href. Since href is blank and so is onclick function, I wonder what happens?

Actually i am redirected to link http://localhost:8080/drm/actions/scm/deploy-manager/filter?filter_preserve=true

I know that if href is blank i shall be redirected to same page. I know that If onclick function returns false the default browser behaviour is cancelled. But what will happen in my case ? Is my onclick function actually blank ? When I put a breakpoint on addCheckBoxValuestoURL(this.href,'null') function, is does not stop.

CASE 1 ( page source )

<a href="/drm/actions/scm/deploy-manager/show? table_name=deployed_packages&filter_preserve=true"
onclick="addCheckBoxValuestoURL(this.href,'null');return false;"><img src="/images/icon_refresh.png" width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Refresh" title="Refresh" /></a>

CASE 2 ( when I inspect element in chrome)

<a href="" onclick=""><img src="/images/icon_refresh.png" width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Refresh" title="Refresh"></a>

The refresh button should redirect it to same page but this functionality is not working.

Answer 1

I dont understand why this happens. Can someone tell me what could be the reason ?

The browser generates a DOM from the source code, then JavaScript modifies the DOM.

Since href is blank and so is onclick function, I wonder what happens?

There must be an event handler in the page which is not bound to the element using the onclick attribute.