I'm writing a Firefox extension (add-on) to allow users to annotate any page with text and/or drawings and then save an image of the page including the annotations. Use cases would be clients reviewing web pages, adding feedback to the page, saving the image of this and emailing it back to the web developer or testers taking annotated screenshots of GUI bugs etc.
I wrote the annotation/drawing functionality in javascript before developing the extension. This script adds a <canvas>
element to the page to draw upon as well as a toolbar (in a <div>
) that contains buttons (each <canvas>
elements) for the different draw tools e.g. line, box, ellipse, text, etc. This works fine when manually included in a page.
I now need a way for the extension to:
- Inject this script into any page, including pages I don't control.
- This needs to occur when the user invokes the extension, which can be after the page has loaded.
- Once injected the
init()
function in this script that adds the canvas and toolbar elements etc. needs to be run somehow, but I can't determine how to call this from the extension.
Note that once injected I don't need this script to interact with the extension (as the extension just takes a screenshot of the entire document (and removes the added page elements) when the user presses the save button in the extension chrome).
I'm writing a Firefox extension (add-on) to allow users to annotate any page with text and/or drawings and then save an image of the page including the annotations. Use cases would be clients reviewing web pages, adding feedback to the page, saving the image of this and emailing it back to the web developer or testers taking annotated screenshots of GUI bugs etc.
I wrote the annotation/drawing functionality in javascript before developing the extension. This script adds a <canvas>
element to the page to draw upon as well as a toolbar (in a <div>
) that contains buttons (each <canvas>
elements) for the different draw tools e.g. line, box, ellipse, text, etc. This works fine when manually included in a page.
I now need a way for the extension to:
- Inject this script into any page, including pages I don't control.
- This needs to occur when the user invokes the extension, which can be after the page has loaded.
- Once injected the
init()
function in this script that adds the canvas and toolbar elements etc. needs to be run somehow, but I can't determine how to call this from the extension.
Note that once injected I don't need this script to interact with the extension (as the extension just takes a screenshot of the entire document (and removes the added page elements) when the user presses the save button in the extension chrome).
Share Improve this question edited Jun 6, 2013 at 11:18 Brock Adams 93.5k23 gold badges240 silver badges304 bronze badges asked May 21, 2010 at 4:58 el grizel griz 1491 gold badge2 silver badges8 bronze badges 1- Did you figure this one out? I managed to inject the code into the page but I haven't figured out how to invoke it. – Mridang Agarwalla Commented Nov 18, 2010 at 13:43
2 Answers
Reset to default 10So this is how I solved my problem by setting the onload attribute to call the init function in the script that's being appended to the page.
var myScript = top.window.content.document.createElement('script');
myScript.type = 'text/javascript';
myScript.setAttribute('src','chrome://path/to/script.js');
myScript.setAttribute('onload', 'firefoxInit()');
top.window.content.document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(myScript);
Use the Greasemonkey extension :
Allows you to customize the way a web page displays or behaves, by using small bits of JavaScript.
Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.
You can write your own scripts, too. Check out http://wiki.greasespot/ to get started.