Question

So I’ve read just about everything I could find on MDN, stackoverflow, etc, and it all seems to be outdated and/or not working. Here is the issue:

I want to automatically put my extension’s “toolbarbutton” on the nav-bar when it is installed, similar to Chrome. What the user does after that point is up to them, although if you remove the button (with this particular extension) you might as well just remove the extension as it’s useless without the button. ANYWAY…

There seems to be two methods for doing this. You can append it to the “currentSet” and make it persist, like this:

var currentset = document.getElementById("nav-bar").currentSet;
currentset=currentset + ",MYBUTTON_ID";
document.getElementById("nav-bar").setAttribute("currentset",currentset);
document.getElementById("nav-bar").currentSet = currentset;
document.persist("nav-bar","currentset");

Or, you can use “insertItem” like this:

var toolbar = document.getElementById("nav-bar");
toolbar.insertItem("MYBUTTON_ID", null);  
toolbar.setAttribute("currentset", toolbar.currentSet);  
document.persist(toolbar.id, "currentset");

Now, if I use the first method, it works, but it completely erases everything else on the nav bar for some reason. “currentSet” doesn’t seem to have the other nav-bar buttons on it when it goes to overwrite it, and so I just end up with the default nav-bar plus my icon. Wiping out all of a user’s other buttons is no good…

The second option doesn’t wipe out the other options, but for whatever reason, the “insertItem” way of doing it doesn’t work at all. My button never appears in the nav-bar, period.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Alright, like I thought, there was nothing wrong with my code, and the problem was exactly as I described.

When the extension is loaded and the script to install the button is executed, it’s done too early. At the time of execution, “currentSet” only contains the default buttons. No other extension buttons are loaded yet. As a result, if you modify the currentSet and save (persist) it, you wipe out all other buttons.

The solution (for me) was to force my “install” script to wait longer. I found that once the page had been loaded, all of the other buttons had enough time to appear. So, I simply did this:

function installButton() {

    var navbar = document.getElementById("nav-bar");
    var newset = navbar.currentSet + ",MYBUTTONID";
    navbar.currentSet = newset;
    navbar.setAttribute("currentset", newset );
    document.persist("nav-bar", "currentset");

}

window.addEventListener("load", function () { installButton(); }, false);