1421410 - Add PDFs generated with browser extension's tab.saveAsPDF() to download history

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Epistemex]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3182.0 Safari/537.36
Build ID: 20171123161455

Steps to reproduce:

From within a browser extension invoke tab.saveAsPDF() (1) to generate and save a tab as PDF.

Example add-on that uses this method:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/page-to-pdf/

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/saveAsPDF


Actual results:

The PDF is saved but does not show in the download history list.

The save dialog is generated and invoked internally (2) from that method so the following may be a challenge.

2: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/extensions/ext-tabs.js#849


Expected results:

IMO, if the "download"/save is successful it should be considered a regular download and added to the download history list (if user settings allows).

This way the user can see if it succeeds as well as allowing the user to open the PDF or its folder directly from within Firefox. The "retry" option in the download list window may be problematic in case of error (?).

Comment 1

[YF (Yang)]

Add to downloads history should be optional. I doubt whether the Retry can work.

Comment 2

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Epistemex, this has been added to the agenda for the WebExtensions APIs triage on March 27, 2018. Would you be able to join us? 

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect at the triage: 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k7AgEyVdZzeF2AIrQl9pP2QRpLENa1OfHvTKhYvKaSo/edit#
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 3

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

This request has been approved. Patches are welcome!

Comment 4

[kernp25]

Maybe dw-dev can work on this?

Comment 5

[dw-dev]

Sorry, but I don't have the time to progress this.