341405 - accept ? %s as a command-line parameter that launches browser and runs a search

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

From Sean Lyndersay of the Windows Vista team:

As you may or may not know, Vista has local search capabilities  
built-in. Many of those entry-points have a way to send the search  
query to a web search engine. For a picture of what this entry- 
point might look like, see the picture of the start menu on this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/foreveryone/ 
searchorg.mspx

As you can see, at the bottom of the start menu, there is an option  
to "Search Internet" using the search term the user has typed (in  
this case "ca"). The way this feature is implemented is that the  
user's default browser is launched with the string "? Searchterm"  
as a parameter (i.e., a question mark followed by the string the  
user has typed so far).

What we do is pretty much the equivalent of appending "? <search term>"
to the browser's command line (which today simply does an "I'm feeling
lucky" search in FF).  

So it would be:
firefox.exe "? foo"

Technically we're using ShellExecuteEX to open the program registered
for the http protocol and then we pass "? <search term>" as the
lpParameters argument, where <search term> is replaced with the term the
user wanted to query for.

This behavior is in the latest public Vista Beta, so it should be easy
to check out (To try it out you can select "search the internet" from
Vista's Start menu, then spawn a search from there while FF is the
default browser).

Comment 1

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Benjamin, is this difficult to do?

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

No, though the fact that it doesn't use standard /flag or -flag is quite annoying.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

FWIW, on testing with Vista the param is passed as "? searchparam" (one argument with a space), not as two arguments

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Attachment: Open a new window with the default search engine, rev. 1

This at least handles the argument reasonably: it opens a new window to display the search results. If you already have Firefox open, this will *not* obey tabbed-browsing preferences, because that requires changes to nsIBrowserDOMWindow.

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 225606 [details] [diff] [review]
Open a new window with the default search engine, rev. 1

>+function doSearch(searchTerm, cmdLine) {

Is there a reason for passing the cmdLine object itself, instead of having the caller pass just the features (especially since both can just call this.getFeatures)?

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Comment on attachment 225606 [details] [diff] [review]
Open a new window with the default search engine, rev. 1


>+function doSearch(searchTerm, cmdLine) {
>+  var ss = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/search-service;1"].
>+    getService(nsIBrowserSearchService);
>+
>+  var submission = ss.defaultEngine.getSubmission(searchTerm);
>+
>+  // fill our nsISupportsArray with uri-as-wstring, null, null, postData
>+  var sa = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/supports-array;1"].
>+    createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsISupportsArray);
>+
>+  var wuri = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/supports-string;1"].
>+    createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsISupportsString);
>+  wuri.data = submission.uri.spec;

I'm not so keen on this style, please use the prevailing (common) style with aligned periods as you do with wwatch below

otherwise, sr=me, please make sure there's a bug on the XXX comment

Comment 7

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Fixed-on-trunk

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Fixed on 1.8 branch for ff2b1