How to delete a specific browser history item based on URL and time range

Question

I'm trying to use chrome.history to delete some specific visits that my extension is automatically visiting in a background window.

I found that there are at least a couple ways to do this:

1. chrome.history.deleteUrl(url): which requires a URL and deletes all occurrences of it.

2. chrome.history.deleteRange(range): which requires a startTime and endTime and deletes all URLs in that range.

How can I combine the two to delete a browser history visit with a specific URL and time range?

Or is there another, perhaps better, way to approach this entirely. Such as proactively setting a listener to delete URLs while automatically surfing them with some combination of the above functions and chrome.history.onVisited.addListener.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here's what I came up with that you can run in a background console to test. It sets a listener, opens up a new tab, and the listener checks for a url match, then deletes the new history item. Lastly, it does a history search to confirm the item was removed:

var url = 'http://stackoverflow.com'

// Get current window
chrome.windows.getCurrent(function(win) { 

    // Add temporary listener for new history visits
    chrome.history.onVisited.addListener(function listener(historyItem) {

        // Check if new history item matches URL
        if (historyItem.url.indexOf(url) > -1) {

            console.log('Found matching new history item', historyItem)
            var visit_time = historyItem.lastVisitTime

            // Delete range 0.5ms before and after history item
            chrome.history.deleteRange({
                startTime: visit_time - 0.5, 
                endTime: visit_time + 0.5
            }, function() { 
                console.log('Removed Visit', historyItem)

                // Get history with URL and see if last item is listed
                chrome.history.search(
                    {text:'stackoverflow'}, 
                    function(result) { 
                        console.log('Show History is deleted:', result) 
                    } )

            });
            chrome.history.onVisited.removeListener(listener)
        }
    });

    // Create new tab
    chrome.tabs.create({ 
        windowId: win.id,
        url: url,
        active: false
    }, function(tab) {
        console.log('Created tab')
    }) 
});

Using only visit_time as both the startTime and endTime didn't work for me. Seems highly unlikely that this would delete more than the new entry though.