For a project I need to get the body of the currently open message and pass that message to a webservice for processing and storing some data of it.
I thaught the best way to do it is to use an extension to grab the message body (and some additional information) and then send that as a webrequest to a service for insertion into the database.
But I have no idea how I should handle this. I followed some tutorials to get me started on chrome plugins but I can't find how to get the body of the message.
I have found that you need content scripts for it, but even then I have no clue.
Can anyone give me a headstart on this?
If I had to do this, I would try and find out the ID of the DIV that contains the body on the GMAIL client... Using jQuery to grab the HTML or text contents of a DIV is real simple... take a look: http://api.jquery.com/html/
A simple jQuery selector would look something like this:
$("#gmailsBodyDivID").html()
If jQuery is not an option, you can get the DIV using JavaScript's getElementByID (http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_doc_getelementbyid.asp)
Finally, as mentioned by DudeOnRock, you should use an Ajax request to your webservice.
The hard part is to know how Gmail names the DIV you're looking for... I just took a quick look and on mine, there was some weird naming...
<div id=":w1" class="ii gt adP adO"><div id=":w2">
I'm not sure what the ":w1" or ":w2" stand for, nor how to use them with a jQuery selector... maybe someone more knowledgeable might shed some light there.
...so I guess you should focus on that first...
If IDs prove hard, you might want to use a jQuery selector by class names...
good luck with that!