Question

I created a chrome extension to make things easier at work. We have a web based application that we use everyday, but it’s often hard or tedious to get tasks accomplished fast. Thus, the extension adds buttons, shortcuts and other custom code to make my life easier.

So use jquery for most part, and I noticed that I am not able to call existing javascript functions that are already part of the system. Is this a limitation of chrome extensions? or is that a way to accomplish this?

For example:

The page has a button <input type="button" name="Insert Row" onclick="add_row()"/>

With Jquery I am able to add other functions to that button, but I am not able to call that function “add_row()” which would add a new row. I need the system to create the rows, instead of me adding them with jquery (cause I don’t have control what happens on the server side).

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This isn’t so much a limitation as an intentional design feature for security.

Although the execution environments of content scripts and the pages that host them are isolated from each other, they share access to the page’s DOM. If the page wishes to communicate with the content script (or with the extension via the content script), it must do so through the shared DOM.

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/content_scripts.html#host-page-communication