Question

I’m creating an extension for Chrome, and one of the functionalities included is the ability for the end user to add people as contacts.

Currently, the contact is saved to the database via AJAX, after which a desktop notification is displayed telling the user that the deed has been done.

However, I would want to first ask the user if he’s sure he wants to do that. So I got the mad idea of wanting to create a new notification from within a notification.

So first, the confirmation HTML notification would be created from the background.html, and displayed. It contains a button, and upon clicking it, it should run the AJAX function and create a second notification, containing the feedback.

However, I seem to be unable to do this. I can’t run createNotification() from the notification, sendRequest() doesn’t seem to go through neither, and I can’t use the onClose listener from background.html, because I want to differentiate between clicking the “Yes” button and the “No” button.

Is there any way I can do this? And if not, how should the confirmation dialog be implemented instead?

Answer 1

Have you tried using chrome.extension.getBackgroundPage()? This may provide the access to your background page’s API that you require. For example, your first notification page calls the following when Yes is clicked;

function yesClicked() {
    chrome.extension.getBackgroundPage().showSecondNotification();
}

The background page declares the showSecondNotification method as follows;

function showSecondNotification() {
    webkitNotifications.createHTMLNotification(
        chrome.extension.getURL('notification2.html')
    ).show();
}

Hopefully, this will cause the second notification to be displayed. I’ve used a similar method in my extensions before but only to retrieve information from the background page. However, I see no reason this shouldn’t work.