Re: sidebar installation problem

David Mischel wrote:
> I have a xul based application I want to install in the sidebar. It
> consists of an app.xul file and an app.js file.
> 
> I have tried two approaches but the preferred one does not work.
> 
> I would prefer to install it as a URL. When I try that two things don't
> work: the popup menu does not display properly (minor) and the
> javascript is not found at all (major). The same problems occur if I use
> the URL in the main browser window. Is this a security issue and if so
> is there a solution for the URL approach?

remote XUL is not privileged. I don't know exactly what you're trying, but
that would be my guess as the problem. I don't know whether code signing
works in XUL, but you probably don't want to go that approach anyway, you
want to install.

> The second approach was to install it via XPI. This was successful. I
> can call the app as a chrome URL in the browser and it works. But I can
> not install the chrome URL in the sidebar (illegal).

A bit of a catch-22, eh?  There's a bug on enhancing XPInstall to install
sidebars, but it got bogged down in grandiose plans by the sidebar folks to
rearchitect things. Those never happened of course :-(

The one approach I've seen is to install along with your chrome sidebar a
XUL page whose sole purpose is to get around the sidebar restrictions. Then
you have to provide a link for the user to open that page as chrome :-(

If you want to do this (it's a royal PITA) you can start with how the DOM
Inspector adds its sidebar from the pref panel option

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/inspector/resources/content/prefs/pref-sidebar.js#110

It's not all in that file, that makes heavy use of a bunch of js utility
functions (particularly ones for RDF) that you can also find elsewhere in
the inspector directories.

-Dan Veditz