I need to open the Chosen dropdown via JavaScript so users do not have to click on the select to show it, how can this be done?
You can open a chosen select box via JS by doing:
$('#<id-of-your-select>_chzn').trigger('mousedown');
where <id-of-your-select>
is the id of your <select>
element.
For ex: if your <select>
element is like <select id="foo" ...>
, then the code above will become:
$('#foo_chzn').trigger('mousedown');