views:

385

answers:

2

I am trying to display a modal Javascript dialog box in Chrome when a user creates a bookmark. However, after trying Closure and SimpleModal+JQuery, I can't seem to get a dialog box to appear. Is this a restriction of extensions in Chrome, or am I doing something very wrong? (I'm still learning Javascript, so my lack of understanding it could very well be the reason.)

Here is my code using Closure. It does make it into the function, so that's working okay. Any suggestions? Thanks!

<html>
    <head>
        <script src="./lib/closure-library/closure/goog/base.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="./lib/closure-library/closure/goog/deps.js"></script>
        <script>goog.require('goog.ui.Dialog');</script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            chrome.bookmarks.onCreated.addListener(function(id, bookmark) {
                // Setup the dialog box.
                var dialog1 = new goog.ui.Dialog();
                dialog1.setContent('[Insert Placeholder]');
                dialog1.setTitle('Title Placeholder');

                // Display dialog.
                dialog1.setVisible(true);
            });
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <!-- Do Nothing -->
    </body>
</html>
+1  A: 

You cannot use a dialog like this in a background page. http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/background_pages.html

You can do that for options page: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/options.html

So in your case, you would want to listen onCreated for bookmarks, and since you want to do a dialog box, you would need to communicate to the page itself. Therefore, you get the selectedTab via http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html#method-getSelected

Once you get the tab, you can then execute the JavaScript: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tabs.html#method-executeScript

Mohamed Mansour
+1  A: 

To clarify Mohamed's answer a bit, closure's modal dialog is in-page HTML. This is probably actually working in your code, but since you're doing it in the background page, and the background page isn't visible, you don't see it. You can use techniques that use window.open or window.alert from the background page, but not things that are trying to display interactive HTML to the user. For that, you'll need to get the content into a popup window or into the page itself as Mohamed suggests.

Erik Kay
I appreciate the clarification (+1). Using the information from Mohamed, I was able to get a dialog to display (well, sort of - it doesn't look correct, but at least something is there), although it does it upon page load, not when I actually add a bookmark (it seems to do it arbitrarily). This is a sticking point for me now. I'm open to suggestions, but I also haven't had time to really play around with it (life has been busy) so it may be something simple.
JasCav