392205 - Add support for arguments to help apps

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 57420

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[alta88]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6


Per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385740

Any user defined external helper app should also allow for arguments.  Likely need 3 things:
1.add a new attribute to handler app code
2.UI to also allow for arg field input (it'd be so much easier if it were a pref and not in .rdf, but..)
3.make sure the string is properly passed to the OS command line processor. the following should all work:
C:\Programs\firefox.exe %uri
C:\Programs\firefox.exe -P myprofile %uri
['|"]C:\Program Files\firefox.exe['|"] -no-remote -P myprofile %uri
/usr/bin/firefox.exe -no-remote
Since the path is stored with " in .rdf, probably need single quotes to delimit, or else add them in the command line handler.

I'd say not handling args is a bug/flaw, but if enh then so be it.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I think this is an enhancement, given that we don't currently claim to support such arguments.  Reporter, can you give a few examples of real-world use cases that we don't currently support?

cc:ing the other folks working on content handling so they are aware of the issue.

Comment 2

[alta88]

some examples:
1. i'd like to open a link in thunderbird with firefox, but not in my main profile (which has 60 extensions and takes 15 seconds to start, and is located in a different window or even terminal in a multi window environment), so i would issue ../firefox.exe -no-profile -P liteprofile %uri.  this is so important to mail link and rss reading that i've written custom code to do it..

2. i'd like to open a word document in a new window only (not disturbing work in some other word window) for a .doc in web page - use ../winword.exe /n %uri

3. for web apps, i believe it would solve a problem especially evident with rss  subscribing as described here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=480357

and i'm sure there are lots of switches one could use when opening external media players, etc etc.  it's a big flexibility enhancement to support args.

imo, one way is with a new args field.  but we can certainly just include the whole string, making sure to delimit the path if it contains spaces and parse properly before putting it to nsIProcess eg.

Comment 3

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

has searching for duplicates gone out of fashion?