How do I ajax request from panel on the Firefox addon?

Question

I have some questions about panel on the Firefox addon. How do I ajax request from panel? And How to debug panel? Firebug can't see panel.

Answer 1

If you need to do a request to a web api from a panel, you'll need to actually make the web request in main.js, and send the result to your panel using

panel.postMessage(results) 

Some documentation you should look at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/dev-guide/guides/content-scripts/index.html

The SDK uses an asynchronous event-driven system to send messages between objects such as a panel and the main addon code. The above guide to content scripts is a great backgrounder for how this system works.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/packages/addon-kit/request.html

The request module allows you to make requests to any web service.

Here is an example add-on that makes a request to the twitter api and passes the results to a page-mod:

https://builder.addons.mozilla.org/package/45866/latest/

This implementation is similar to what you would need to do to trigger an api request from a panel.