734201 - Tutorial for interaction with page scripts through page mod.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: Documentation, defect, P1)

Description

[Irakli Gozalishvili [:irakli] [:gozala] [@gozala]]

Lot's of people raise this question and we usually propose to use undocumented and unsupported `unsafeWindow` of the page mode. We should not do that as we might even remove it in a future. Instead we should write tutorial about how to do that in a correct way which would be more or less what is done here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Code_snippets/Interaction_between_privileged_and_non-privileged_pages

Comment 1

[David Mason [:dcm :dmason]]

Will. I'd give this a P1.5 were there such a thing ;)

Comment 2

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

I'm a bit confused about this.

If you mean, a tutorial explaining interaction between a content script and a page script, my understanding was that it's done using window.postMessage: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.postMessage, and this is already documented in the SDK here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/1.6/dev-guide/guides/content-scripts/access.html - although that should be expanded and perhaps packaged as a tutorial.

Is the technique of using DOM custom events an additional technique that should be added there? Is it preferable to using window.postMessage? Or is it complementary?

Comment 3

[Irakli Gozalishvili [:irakli] [:gozala] [@gozala]]

(In reply to Will Bamberg [:wbamberg] from comment #2)
> I'm a bit confused about this.
> 
> If you mean, a tutorial explaining interaction between a content script and
> a page script, my understanding was that it's done using window.postMessage:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.postMessage, and this is already
> documented in the SDK here:
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/1.6/dev-guide/guides/
> content-scripts/access.html - 

I have probably missed this one. 

> although that should be expanded and perhaps
> packaged as a tutorial.
> 

Yeah I think tutorial would be a great addition, explaining how one could use thin instead of `unsafeWindow`.

> Is the technique of using DOM custom events an additional technique that
> should be added there? Is it preferable to using window.postMessage? Or is
> it complementary?

I don't think it's much different from `postMessage`. It's just if document uses `postMessage` for something else add-on will be notified and there is this complication of using document.defaultView...

With custom events as described in the link below, you wont have this issues but it's
bit verbose:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Code_snippets/Interaction_between_privileged_and_non-privileged_pages

Comment 4

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

Attachment: pointer to pull request

In the end I kept this inside the "content scripts guide" rather than adding a new tutorial. I feel it's better to have all this stuff together. But I split the old "access" page into 2 new pages, "Accessing the DOM" and "Communicating With Other Scripts" which should hopefully improve discoverability.

Comment 5

[Irakli Gozalishvili [:irakli] [:gozala] [@gozala]]

Comment on attachment 641933 [details]
pointer to pull request

Please see improvement suggestions in the pull request

Comment 6

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/commit/8c602be7ce2ae1a73eaa7f7534bb8e78e17c5bb0
Merge pull request #489 from wbamberg/734201

Fix bug 734201 - Tutorial for interaction with page scripts through page mod.

Comment 7

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to stabilization at https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/commit/c8d9ad5525451d1363cd7cbf0809776a4e73ef32
Merge pull request #489 from wbamberg/734201

Fix bug 734201 - Tutorial for interaction with page scripts through page mod. (cherry picked from commit 8c602be7ce2ae1a73eaa7f7534bb8e78e17c5bb0)