I had a similar problem: I wanted my date picker to appear when the link was clicked and I don't have a field (or rather a hidden field). (My use case was that the date on the calendar should have been used to determine the date range before and including this date picker, so I don't need the actual date value, except that it needs to be passed to the onSelect handler.)
So this works in Firefox:
<a ...>click for calendar: <input type="hidden" value="" /> </a>
but not in Chrome. Replace with:
<input type="text" value="" style="display: none" />
also failed. I ended up with this:
<input type="text" value="" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; border: none; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0" />
although I'm not proud of it!
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