Display options.xul programmatically

2
votes

I have an xul overlay based Firefox Add-on that works. It has inline options defined in content/options.xul and they display/function correctly when the user goes to Firefox->Add-ons->Extensions->{The Name of My Extension}->Options

The question, can I a create a button on my Add-on that will launch my options either by taking the user to Firefox->Add-ons->Extensions->{The Name of My Extension}->Options with one click or by launching a dialog based on options.xul?

Right now I am maintaining a separate options.html and options.js that gets and sets the same settings that options.xul handles when the user navigates there via the Firefox button but I would much rather dump options.html and options.js and only maintain my main.js and options.xul.

Any comments or code examples will be greatly appreciated.

1
firefox-addonxul

1 Answers

4
votes

This is easiest to do via a global function BrowserOpenAddonsMgr() defined in the browser window, like this:

BrowserOpenAddonsMgr("addons://detail/" + encodeURIComponent(addonID));

This function takes care of focusing the existing add-ons tab if there is one or opening a new tab. It will not scroll down to the options however which is an issue if the add-on has a lengthy description. Starting with Firefox 12 this can be solved by adding "/preferences" to the view identifier:

BrowserOpenAddonsMgr("addons://detail/" + encodeURIComponent(addonID) + "/preferences");

With older Firefox versions you are out of luck (and you shouldn't use this suffix there, it won't work). The other issue is that there can be a lengthy "loading" phase where the add-ons manager fetches metadata for all extensions.