在新标签页中打开页面上的所有链接并跟踪这些标签页

Question

I know I cannot directly access the DOM from the main function in a firefox addon with the SDK, and therefore I cannot obtain the href values from the a tags directly either. How can I make my addon open all of the links on a page as new tabs and add those to an array? I don't want new tabs manually opened by the user to be tracked, just the ones created by this addon.

Answer 1

Partially solved the issue a while back so I figure I'll point out what I know.

Since the main script can't access the DOM itself, it can instead attach a worker to the current tab. The worker can read all of the links and store them as a list, then send that list back to the add-on. The add-on can then open new tabs directed at all the links in that list.

In main, add a content script to the tab:

function attachScript() {
  var worker = tabs.activeTab.attach({
    contentScriptFile: self.data.url("content-script.js")
  });
  worker.port.on("links", function(links) {
    for each(var l in links) {
        tabs.open(l);
    }
  }); // Start listening for links sent by the tab's worker
  worker.port.emit("get-links"); // Request links from worker
}

In the content script, upon receiving a get-links message, read all the links and send them back using port:

self.port.on("get-links", handleMessage); // Start listening for requests for links on page

function handleMessage(message) {
  var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); // Get all a elements on page
  alert(anchors.length); // Report quantity of a elements found
  var hrefs = [];
  for each (var a in anchors) {
    hrefs.push(a.href); // Add all target urls of a elements to array
  }
  self.port.emit("links", hrefs); // Send array of urls to add-on script
}

As for tracking the tabs, I imagine keeping a list of the workers would be the appropriate way to accomplish this. I haven't tried that part yet as I had to put this project down for a while.