Adding screenshot functionality to a firefox extension

Question

Is there a cross-platform approach to taking screenshots from a firefox extension?

Ideally I'd like to be able to take a screenshot of a dom element (irrespective of whether it's visible on the page or not), something like:

var screenshot = screenshot(document.getElementById('example');

Any pointers or suggestions would be nice, searching https://developer.mozilla.org/ only yields screenshots they've used in various guides.

Answer 1

After examining the code of several extensions. I took the following approach (to take a snapshot of a particular dom element). This can be used in a Firefox extension to take screenshots of the whole page, to take screenshots of the browser window and to take screenshots of a particular dom element (and all of its child nodes):

1. Add canvas to xul.
2. Find dimensions and top-left co-ordinates of element.
3. Copy portion of window to canvas.
4. Convert canvas to base64 PNG file.

function getElementScreenshot(elm) {
    var x = findPosX(elm);
    var y = findPosY(elm);
    var width = elm.clientWidth;
    var height = elm.clientHeight;
    var cnvs = document.getElementById("aCanvas");
    cnvs.width = width;
    cnvs.height = height;
    var ctx = cnvs.getContext("2d");
    // To take a snapshot of entire window
    // ctx.drawWindow(mainWindow.content, 0, 0, mainWindow.innerWidth, mainWindow.innerHeight, "rgb(255,255,255)");
    ctx.drawWindow(mainWindow.content, x, y, width, height, "rgb(255,255,255)");
    return(cnvs.toDataURL());
}

---

To find top left coordinate of an element

function findPosX(obj) {
    var curleft = 0;
    if (obj.offsetParent) {
        while (1) {
            curleft += obj.offsetLeft;
            if (!obj.offsetParent) {
                break;
            }
            obj = obj.offsetParent;
        }
    } else if (obj.x) {
        curleft += obj.x;
    }
    return curleft;
}

function findPosY(obj) {
    var curtop = 0;
    if (obj.offsetParent) {
        while (1) {
            curtop += obj.offsetTop;
            if (!obj.offsetParent) {
                break;
            }
            obj = obj.offsetParent;
        }
    } else if (obj.y) {
        curtop += obj.y;
    }
    return curtop;
}

---

To get access to browser.xul from sidebar

var mainWindow = window.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor)
                       .getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIWebNavigation)
                       .QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDocShellTreeItem)
                       .rootTreeItem
                       .QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor)
                       .getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDOMWindow);

mainWindow.gBrowser.addTab(...);