- Use
Routerto simplify youronMessageevent listener routing - Use
Clientas a shorthand forsendMessage - Use
Loggerfor decoratingconsole.logwith intuitive interface
to write your Chrome Extension in the way of Web Application Development.
Message Passing plays a crucial role in the development of Chrome extensions. Therefore, as Chrome extensions become more feature-rich, the variety of messages being sent and received between the background and other contexts increases. Managing all of this within a single onMessage.addListener and dispatching to different handlers can make the code quite messy.
Which is like this:
// This is what we do usually... 😰
chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener(async (message, sender, sendResponse) => {
switch (message.action) {
case '/users/list':
const users = await Users.getAll()
sendResponse({ users });
break;
case '/users/get':
const user = await Users.get(message.userId);
sendResponse({ user });
break;
case '/users/update':
const user = Users.get(message.userId)
// more your code here...
break;
default:
sendResponse({ message: "Not Found..." });
}
return true;
});This is very similar to what we write when we build a web application and routing HTTP request. Then, if we organize the code in that manner, we can create a Chrome extension source code that is more comprehensible and maintainable.
Specifically, it would look like this:
const router = new Router();
router.on("/users/list", ListUsersController);
router.on("/users/{id}", GetUserController);
router.on("/users/{id}/update", UpdateUserController);
router.onNotFound(NotFoundController);
chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener(router.listener());
// Simple! 🤗then one of your controllers will look like this:
async function ListUsersController(message, sender) {
const users = await Users.getAll();
return { users }; // You don't even need sendResponse
}
async function GetUserController(this: {id: string}, message, sender) {
// You can retrieve path parameter from `this` arg
const user = await Users.get(this.id);
return { user };
}this will make our life easier.
Then simply you can send message to this listener like this:
const users = await chrome.runtime.sendMessage({action: '/users/list'});
// Nothing different to whant we do usually.In case you need some shorthand to send message, which might be a HTTP client in web application, there is Client you can use and you can avoid using action field in your message.
const client = new Client(chrome.runtime);
// path (=action) only
const users = await client.send('/users/list');
// path with request body
const updated = await client.send(`/users/${id}/update`, {name: "otiai20"});Now you might want something like ActiveRecord to access and OR-mapping chrome.storage.
There is a separated package: jstorm - JavaScript ORM for chrome.storage and LocalStorage.
https://github.com/otiai10/jstorm
Small example:
// This uses window.sessionStorage
import { Model } from "jstorm/browser/session";
class User extends Model {
public name: string;
public age: number;
}
(async () => {
const otiai10 = User.new({name:"otiai10"});
(otiai10._id) // null, yes
await otiai10.save();
(otiai10._id) // NOT null, because saved
const found = await User.find(otiai10._id);
(found._id == otiai10._id) // true
otiai10.delete();
})();Last but not least, logging is also important for us. Even though we know we can customize console.log by %c decorator, it would be messy if we do that all the time. Logger is just a memorandum for that decoration, or we can just use like following:
import {Logger, LogLevel} from "chromite";
const logger = new Logger("your_project", LogLevel.ERROR);
logger.warn("hello", 100, {name: "otiai10"});
// prints nothing because level is set to "ERROR"
// This prints these messages with colored prefix "[ERROR]"
logger.error("hey", {code: 500, msg: ["some", "problem"]});