Question

How does a Thunderbird addon access external data?

Our company would like to build an addon to Thunderbird so that the customer service department can send emails to customer based on Thunderbird email templates containing external dynamic data (outside TB and the local computer) such as customer no, order no, order details, amounts, etc…

Is this even possible? How about security? Read up on Mozilla addons but the information there didn’t provide enough detail.

Thx.

Answer 1

Here is some code, taken from Connecting to Remote Content in the great XUL School Tutorial tutorial. It works for bith Firefox and Thunderbird extensions.

var url = "http://www.example.com/";
let request = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/xmlextras/xmlhttprequest;1"].createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIXMLHttpRequest);

request.onload = function(aEvent) {
window.alert("Response Text: " + aEvent.target.responseText);
};

request.onerror = function(aEvent) {
window.alert("Error Status: " + aEvent.target.status);
};

request.open("GET", url, true);
request.send(null);

This sends and asynchronous XMLHttpRequest to a web server and gets back the server response in either text or XML format.