Firefox addon sdk: retrieving value from a different site based on clipboard content

Question

I just got started with firefox addons to help my team fasten up our work, what i am trying to create: When being on a specific site (let's call it mysite.com/input) i want to fill out automatically an input with an id: "textinput" from the value that is stored on the clipboard. Yeah it is simple yet it would be simply enough to paste it, wouldn't it?... now here is the twist:

I need an other form of the value: on the clipboard it is x/y/z. There is a database site (let's call it database.com) on which searching like database.com?s=x/y/z would directly give the page from where it is possible to gain the correct value as it has an id: #result

I got lost how to properly communicate between page and content scripts, i'm not even sure in what order should i use the pagemod and the page-worker

Please help me out! Thank you!

Answer 1

The basic flow is this:

• In your content script, you get the value form the form, somehow. I'll leave that up to you.

• Still in the content script, you send the data to main.js using self.port.emit:

Code:

self.port.emit('got-my-value', myValue);

• In main.js, you would then receive the 'got-my-value' event and make a cross-domain request using the request module.

Code:

require('page-mod').PageMod({
    include: 'somesite.com',
    contentScriptFile: data.url('somescript.js'),
    onAttach: function(worker) {
        worker.port.on('got-my-value', function(value) {
            require('request').Request({
                url: 'http://someurl.com',
                onComplete: function(response) {
                    console.log(response);
                    // maybe send data back to worker?
                    worker.port.emit('got-other-data', response.json);
                }
            }).post();
        });
    }
});

• If you need to receive the data back in the original worker, you would another listener for the event coming back.

Code:

self.port.on('got-other-data', function(value) {
    // do something
})