250715 - Opening a third-party sidebar throws a JS error

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 271022

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040708 Firefox/0.9.0+ (best browser EVAR1!!)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040708 Firefox/0.9.0+

When I open a third-party sidebar in Firefox, I get this error:

Error: searchBox has no properties
Source File: chrome://browser/content/browser.js
Line: 3009

browser.js:
>  if (aCommandID != "viewWebPanelsSidebar") { // no searchbox there
>    // if the sidebar we want is already constructed, focus the searchbox
>    if ((aCommandID == "viewBookmarksSidebar" &&
sidebar.contentDocument.getElementById("bookmarksPanel"))
>    || (aCommandID == "viewHistorySidebar" &&
sidebar.contentDocument.getElementById("history-panel")))
>      sidebar.contentDocument.getElementById("search-box").focus();
>    // otherwiese, attach an onload handler
>    else
>      sidebar.addEventListener("load", asyncFocusSearchBox, true);
>  }


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install QuickNote
2. Open QN in sidebar

Actual Results:  
an error in JS Console

Expected Results:  
no error

I've seen this problem with QuickNote and Sage.

As far as I can tell, the cause of this error is that the code above assumes
that there are only three sidebars - viewWebPanelsSidebar, viewBookmarksSidebar
and viewHistorySidebar, which is wrong. The solution is to use ((aCommandID ==
"viewBookmarksSidebar") || (aCommandID == "viewHistorySidebar")) instead.

Comment 1

[Till]

This JavaScript-error occurs in every sidebar without the expected textbox.

Perhaps the better solution would be to check simply if there is an element
named 'search-box', instead of the proposed one by Nickolay. So Firefox could
support even third-party sidebars (i.e. focus the search box).

(In Firefox 1.0 it seems to be line# 3330)

Comment 2

[u130342]

I suggest creating a new attribute: "autoactivateid" with the name of the
element to focus. Or "onactivate" with javascript code.

function asyncOnActivate(event)  // blindwritten: may contain errors
{
  var sidebar = document.getElementById("sidebar");
  sidebar.removeEventListener("load", asyncOnActivate, true); // do first 

  // element id case
  var toFocus = sidebar.getAttribute("autoactivateid");
  if(toFocus && toFocus.length) 
  {
    try {
    var elem=sidebar.contentDocument.getElementById(toFocus);
    if(elem) elem.focus(); 
    } catch(e) {}

  // script case
  var toScript = sidebar.getAttribute("onactivate");
  if(toScript && toScript.length) 
  {
    (new Function(event, toScript))(event);
  }
}

if not at least this should be done:
function asyncFocusSearchBox(event)
{
  var sidebar = document.getElementById("sidebar");
  try {
    var searchBox = sidebar.contentDocument.getElementById("search-box");
    searchBox.focus(); 
  } catch(e) {}
  sidebar.removeEventListener("load", asyncFocusSearchBox, true);
}

Comment 3

[Michael Bolin]

How about the 1-line fix so hopefully this can make it into 1.5:

if (searchBox) searchBox.focus();

Comment 4

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 271022 ***