Prevent event listener from been execute in Google Chrome Extension

Question

I want to build a Google Chrome extension to sync all my bookmarks across Chrome so I have attached an event listener to onCreated;

chrome.bookmarks.onCreated.addListener(function (id, bookmark) {
    console.log('Hey bookmark created ' + id);
});

The idea is that when the user creates a new bookmark this onCreated event listener sends a JSON object to a server via an AJAX request stating that a bookmark has been created.

If the server then returns a JSON object which indicates that the new bookmark should be created on the browser I don't need the onCreated event listener to be executed.

Basically, the idea is that the event listener should only be triggered if a bookmark has been manually created by the user and not programmatically.

For example, the event listener should not be executed when if a bookmark is created using the following command;

chrome.bookmarks.create({
   parentId: '648',
   title: 'Google Folder'
});

Answer 1

If I understood correctly, you want to be able to pause chrome.bookmarks.onCreated while you are creating bookmarks programmatically. There is no clean way of doing it afaik, as Chrome API doesn't provide a way of removing event listeners, only adding.

I would try to make some global switch probably:

var listenerEnabled = true;
chrome.bookmarks.onCreated.addListener(function (id, bookmark) {
    if(listenerEnabled) {
        console.log('Hey bookmark created ' + id);
    }
});

function createBookmark() {
    listenerEnabled = false;
    chrome.bookmarks.create({parentId: '648',title: 'Google Folder'}, function() {
        //enable with delay in case listener fires late
        setTimeout(function() {
            listenerEnabled = true;
        }, 500);
    });
}

Another way would be marking bookmarks created programattically (by appending something to title for example), and then inside the listener you can detect them and remove this mark.