Finding Window and Navigating to URL with Crossrider

Question

I'm rather new to Javascript and Crossrider. I believe what I'm trying to do is a rather simple thing - maybe I missed something here?

I am writing an extension that automatically logs you into Dropbox and at a later time will log you out. I can log the user into Dropbox automatically, but now my client wants me to automatically log those people out of dropbox by FINDING the open Dropbox windows and logging each one of them out.

He says he's seen it and it's possible.

Basically what I want is some code that allows me to get the active tabs, and set the location.href of those tabs. Or even close them. So far this is what I got:

//background.js:

appAPI.ready(function($) {

// Initiate background timer
backgroundTimer();

// Function to run backround task every minute
function backgroundTimer() {

    if (appAPI.db.get('logout') == true)
    {
        // retrieves the array of tabs
        appAPI.tabs.getAllTabs(function(allTabInfo) 
        {

            // loop through tabs
            for (var i=0; i<allTabInfo.length; i++) 
            {
                //is this dropbox?
                if (allTabInfo[i].tabUrl.indexOf('www.dropbox.com')!=-1)
                {
                    appAPI.tabs.setActive(allTabInfo[i].tabId);

                                    //gives me something like chrome-extension://...
                    window.alert(window.location.href);

                                    //code below doesn't work
                    //window.location.href = 'https://www.dropbox.com/logout';

                }

            }
            appAPI.db.set('logout',false);
        });
        window.alert('logged out.');
    }


    setTimeout(function() {
        backgroundTimer();
    }, 10 * 1000);
}

});

When I do appAPI.tabs.setActive(allTabInfo[i].tabId); and then window.alert(window.location.href); I get as address "chrome-extension://xxx" - which I believe is the address of my extension, which is totally not what I need, but rather the URL of the active window! More than that, I need to navigate the current window to the log out page... or at least refresh it. Can anybody help, please?

-Rowan R. J.

P.S. Earlier I tried saving the window reference of the dropbox URL I opened, but I couldn't save the window reference into the appAPI.db, so I changed technique. Help!

Answer 1

In general, your use of the Crossrider APIs looks good.

The issue here is that you are trying to use window.location.href to get the address of the active tab. However, in the background scope, the window object relates to the background page/tab and and not the active tab; hence you receive the URL of the background page. [Note: Scopes can't directly interactive with each others objects]

Since your objective is to change/close the URL of the active dropbox tab, you can achieve this using messaging between scopes. So, in your example you can send a message from the background scope to the extension page scope with the request to logout. For example (and I've taken the liberty to simplify the code):

background.js:

appAPI.ready(function($) {
  appAPI.setInterval(function() {
    if (appAPI.db.get('logout')) {
      appAPI.tabs.getAllTabs(function(allTabInfo) {
        for (var i=0; i<allTabInfo.length; i++) {
          if (allTabInfo[i].tabUrl.indexOf('www.dropbox.com')!=-1) {
            // Send a message to all tabs using tabId as an identifier
            appAPI.message.toAllTabs({
              action: 'logout',
              tabId: allTabInfo[i].tabId
            });
          }
        }
        appAPI.db.set('logout',false);
      });
    }
  }, 10 * 1000);
});

extension.js:

appAPI.ready(function($) {
  // Listen for messsages
  appAPI.message.addListener(function(msg) {
    // Logout if the tab ids match
    if (msg.action === 'logout' && msg.tabId === appAPI.getTabId()) {
      // change URL or close code
    }
  });
});

Disclaimer: I am a Crossrider employee