Creating Google Chrome Extensions – II

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Here we are again, let’s continue from where I get stuck on my previous post. I have started creating a google chrome extension, and I was stuck, because the Javascript code being executed on a separated context.

Once I realized which was the problem I started googling around, until I found a script able to execute a given javascript code in page’s context.

Basically, the works by injecting the given javascript code in dom’s page, at the document head section:

<script type="text/javascript">Your code</script></head>

This way it gets executed in the page’s context, instead of the extension’s one. You just have to call injectScript, passing the code to be executed as parameter, and optionally you can even send function arguments, if the given code is a function.

At the begining, I had some problems, because as I said previously, my extension was being injected at the “document_start”. That means, even before the head tag is defined. This was causing a javascript error (undefined head), but I really needed to put the script at the begining, in order to save a copy of window.console object before it was overriden by Magento.

After some attempts, I was able to inject it as soon as the head is defined, just by creating a timer interval, and prepending some lines at the begining of voodooattack’s function. This is how it looks like (I’ll put just the new lines of the injectScript function for the shake of simplicity):

//Wait 1 milisecond because the document's head might be not defined yet, so we cannot append our script
var theDeveloperWorldIsYours = setInterval(function(){ injectScript(restoreConsole)}, 1);
function injectScript(source){
    //Cannot execute this script until head has been defined
    if (document.head === null) {
        return;
    } else {
        clearInterval(theDeveloperWorldIsYours);
    }
...
}

The function execution is prevented until the document.head is defined, where I firstly remove the timer, and that’s it.

After this modifications, I got a quick and dirty solution:

//Function that stores the window.console in a variable to restore if after magento script has remove id
var restoreConsole = function(){
        //Function that checks if console.log has been removed and restores it
        var checkRestore = function(){
                //Once magento removes the console, this method is defined, so he have to restore the old console
                if (typeof window.console.log.argumentNames != 'undefined') {
                        window.console = __consola;
                        if (__retry-- == 0) {
                                console.log("Console restored by TheDeveloperWorldIsYours!");
                                clearInterval(a);
                        }
                }
        }
        __retry = 10;   //Retry several times, as magento is removing console on a loop, and it might take some time
        __consola = window.console;
        a = setInterval(checkRestore, 1);
        //After 1 second, clearInterval
        setTimeout(function(){clearInterval(a);},1000);
}
//On browsing sometimes you have to wait
injectScript(restoreConsole);
//Wait 1 milisecond because the <head> document isn't defined yet, so we cannot append our script
var theDeveloperWorldIsYours  = setInterval(function(){ injectScript(restoreConsole)}, 1);

I was saving console’s object on a global variable, and I then I was waiting until the original window.console is overriden by magento. I noticed that the method argumentNames is undefined on the original code, but not after it’s been replaced, so I used it as flag.

Once the flag is set, I have to replace the object with the original one several times, as I noticed that only one wasn’t enough, because magento’s overriding loop might be still in execution.

I also added a timer removal after one second, in order to prevent infinite timers execution on all other pages.

This code kinda works, but it has several drawbacks, apart from the obvious overuse of timers.
The main problem was that I noticed that it wasn’t working every time. It works once you load a magento page or if you refresh the window. However, once you are browsing around, it seems that the magento code is cached, and therefore it’s being executed right before the extension could inject the code in the document’s head. This broke my code, because I wouldn’t be able to save a original copy of window.console on time.

I was wondering if I could pass window.console object as function argument from the extension’s context, as it wasn’t being overriden by magento, but then I found a solution even better, just by coincidence.

I was having a look at stackoverflow (I’m sorry but I don’t remember exactly which page was), and I saw an alternative way of getting a working window.console object. It sees that you can get it from an iframe, so I just had to dynamically create an iframe, append it to the page and retrieve window.console object from it. This is the final version of the code:

/**
 *  restoreConsole
 *  This code is supposed to be injected into the dom document at the very begining of the page load.
 *  Check for attempts to unset the console.log, and restore it back if needed.
 *  The execution will stop once the page has been loaded.
 *
 *  @author Javier Carrascal <javilumbrales[at]gmail[dot]com>
 *  @return void
 */
var restoreConsole = function() {
    __theDeveloperWorldIsYours = setInterval(function() {
        //Anonymous function that checks if console.log has been removed
        //By default, console.log.name should return "log", otherwhise, something has removed it and we have to restore it
        if (typeof window.console.log.name !== 'log' && document.head !== null) {
            //We can restore the original window.console by creating an iframe and appending it to the document
            var i = document.createElement('iframe');
            i.style.display = 'none';
            //We append it to the head so we don't miss console.log messages sent before the body.
            document.head.appendChild(i);
            window.console = i.contentWindow.console;
            console.log('Console restored by TheDeveloperWorldIsYours!');
            //We are done here
            clearInterval(__theDeveloperWorldIsYours);
        }

    }, 1);
    //Stop the execution of the code after page has been loaded.
    window.onload = function() { clearInterval(__theDeveloperWorldIsYours);};
}

This is IMO a much better approach which actually works well. It might probably be improved, of course, but at least its working fine for my purposes. For instance now I’m able to use Google Analytics Debugger extension on any magento page and check what’s being push at the page load, and I’m finally able to use console.log anywhere and at any time .

If you have any questions/suggestions/improvements, they are more than welcomed.

Special thanks for voodooattack’s blog, because without its script, I wouldn’t have been able to get it working.

Find attached the full code of the extension, just in case you want to give it a try, or just have a look.

Creating Google Chrome Extensions – I

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This is the story of how I wanted to restore the console.log on the sites that prevent you to use it by overriding the object on the page load. I’ll tell my experience and meanwhile, I’ll show you how to create your own google chrome extensions.

Some applications tend to disable/remove the console.log, usually to hide the debugging messages and/or avoid problems with older versions of IE. For instance, Magento has a script code that erases all the window.console code. This can be very annoying when you have to debug some javascript code, as you cannot print anything on the console. Your options are reduced to either use the built-in Javascript debugger, by putting a break point on the code, or go back to the old times of the well-known alerts. Both options are not so bad, but I am a bit stubborn, and I want to be able to use my loved console.log anywhere and at any time, so I had to fix this. Please, note that I just could remove the offending code from the magento javascript file, but that would be too easy and uninteresting at all, not to mention that I rather leave it disabled at least for the production environment, and I didn’t want to make a environment-dependent code.

I thought that maybe I would be able to install some browser extension that would do all the job for me just by pressing one button, but after a depth research I was unable to find it. It seemed like nobody had the same problem, or nobody cares about it.

I was wondering how to make my own workaround. My idea was to save a copy of the window.console object into a variable just before the evil code was executed. Then, I just would need to restore the saved copy in window.console, and hopefully I would get the console working.

I remembered that I’ve used once a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey that allows to inject Javascript code on the pages, so I gave it a try. Unluckily, after some failed attempts I realized that all the scripts are executed after the page loaded event, wich didn’t serve for my purposes.

After googling for a while, I come up to the conclusion that the only way to do what to do that was to create my own browser extension. I had never tried something like that before, so I decided to try it. After having a look at Chrome documentation, I started developing my first version. It’s ridiculously easy to create a Google Chrome Extension, you just need a manifest.json (specifying a few settings), and a javascript file (depending on your needs, of course, you might need more stuff).

This is how my manifest.json looks:

{
 "name": "Enable Console.log - The Developers World Is Yours",
 "description": "This extensions automatically restores the console object, if any javascript code attempts to remove it.",
 "manifest_version": 2,
 "version": "1.0",
 "content_scripts": [
 {
 "matches": ["http://*/*"],
 "js": ["enable.js"],
 "run_at": "document_start"
 }
 ]
}

Basically, the first lines are just standard fields, and the interesting part is focused on the last three lines:
“matches”: [“http://*/*”]: Means that my extension should be executed at any page.
“js”: [“enable.js”]: This is the source file of the Javascript code that will be executed.
“run_at”: “document_start”: This line specifies WHEN should the script be executed. In my case, I want it to be executed at the very begining, so I’ve set the option “document_start”.

More information regarding the options of this settings can be found at google documentation page.

With the manifest.json done, I could focus on the interesting part, my own extension. I started doing some tests and the expectations were good. I was able to print debug messages in the console from my extension, which means that it was being executed before the page javascript code. This should be enough for me to save in memory a copy of the window.console object and then I just have to wait some time and restore it, if needed.

This is the code I had so far on my “enable.js” file:

var __working_console = window.console;
//Each second, try to put a console.log message
var count = 5;
var test = setInterval(function(){
console.log("Console is still working!");
//Stop it after a while
if (count == 0) {
window.console = __working_console; //Try to restart the console, just in case (IT DOESN'T WORK)
clearInterval(test);
} else {
count = count -1;
}
}, 1000);

I was on my way doing the script, when I realized that I have a big problem: My script was being executed on a different context. It seems that from a Chrome Extension script, you are able to retrieve data from the page, but your code isn’t actually being executed likely a common script loaded on he header’s page (or anywhere else). This means that, even though I was able to save a copy of a working version of window.console object, I was unable to restore it in the page context. Because the window object where the Chrome extension is executed, is different from the window object of the page, so no matters what I do, that I won’t be able to change anything.

Very bad news, but did not give up, and I did well, because although I didn’t know yet, I was very close to find the solution. Do you want to know how I did it, eventually? Do not miss the second part!

Shared preferences

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We can say that “shared preferences” initial functionality is worth remembering and share it with other methods or activities. What is really interesting about this feature is that this value will continue recorded and remembered though we close our application or reboot the phone.
For example, many applications we install on our phones have the particularity that it is the first time I run gives us a number of options, if you’ve already performed before, we offer different alternatives. This can be done easily with “shared preferences”.
Another example of this is the recording functionality users, I mean, let us take the example that we are working on an application that will be able to be executed by some registered users and each take a particular condition. Most often in these cases is to access a database, but if we are not talking about a very high number, we can create the characteristics of each user with “shared preference” will be discussed as these permanently remembered.

For this occasion I mounted a simple interface with two buttons and a text field.
The first “Save” button serves to keep within our “shared preferred” the value that we put into our text field. The second “Show” will be in charge of recovering the value at the time we ask.
At this point we recall the important feature of this function. Say we write in our text field “Hello Android” and click the save button thereupon turned our phone, we take it on and run our application again, if directly click on the button “Show”, we will recover the previously saved value “Hello android”.

import android.content.Context;
import android.content.SharedPreferences;

public class PreferencesManager {

    private static final String PREF_NAME = "com.example.app.PREF_NAME";
    private static final String UPDATE = "com.thedeveloperworldisyours.unitconverterpro.UPDATE";

    private static PreferencesManager sInstance;
    private final SharedPreferences mSharedPreferences;

    private PreferencesManager(Context context) {
        mSharedPreferences = context.getSharedPreferences(PREF_NAME, Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
    }

    public static synchronized void initializeInstance(Context context) {
        if (sInstance == null) {
            sInstance = new PreferencesManager(context);
        }
    }

    public static synchronized PreferencesManager getInstance() {
        if (sInstance == null) {
            throw new IllegalStateException(PreferencesManager.class.getSimpleName() +
                    " is not initialized, call initializeInstance(..) method first.");
        }
        return sInstance;
    }

    public void setUpdate(String date) {
        mSharedPreferences.edit()
                .putString(UPDATE, date)
                .commit();
    }

    public String getUpdate() {
        return mSharedPreferences.getString(UPDATE, "");
    }

    public void remove(String key) {
        mSharedPreferences.edit()
                .remove(key)
                .commit();
    }

    public boolean clear() {
        return mSharedPreferences.edit()
                .clear()
                .commit();
    }
}

In your activity

you can set and get the string

PreferencesManager.getInstance().setUpdate("17/5/2012");

myDate = PreferencesManager.getInstance().getUpdate();

Android, CheckBox and RadioButton Custom Style

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android checkbox and radiobutton custom styleYou might want to create your own CheckBox custom style, and RadioButton custom style in Android, for your applications.

This is how you can achieve it, in a few steps:
-Create Image Drawables for their two stater (checked/unchecked).
-Create selector for this two drawables. The sample content should be something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
	<item android:state_checked="true" android:drawable="@drawable/unchecked" />
	<item android:state_checked="false" android:drawable="@drawable/checked" />
</selector>

-Add this selector as android:button attribute for CheckBox or RadioButton

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:background="@drawable/background">

    <CheckBox
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:button="@drawable/checkbox_selector"
        android:text="Custom CheckBox" />

    <RadioButton
        android:id="@+id/radioButton1"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:button="@drawable/checkbox_selector"
        android:text="Custom RadioButton" />

</LinearLayout>

You can download this code: download code

Save and retrieve date in android

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//To obtain shared preferences
SharedPreferences prefs = this.getSharedPreferences("com.example.app", Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
//To read preferences
String dateTimeKey = "com.example.app.datetime";
// use a default value using new Date()
long l = prefs.getLong(dateTimeKey, new Date().getTime());
System.out.println("_____fecha de pref"+l);

//long to Date
Date datata = new Date(l);
System.out.println("Data convert of long to date"+datata);

// Date to Calendar
Calendar t1=Calendar.getInstance();
t1.setTime(datata);
System.out.println("convert date to calendar"+t1.getTime());

Calendar t2 = Calendar.getInstance();
System.out.println("second date"+t2.getTime());

//deduct date
int second = t2.get(Calendar.SECOND) - t1.get(Calendar.SECOND);
System.out.println("the seconds:"+second);

//To edit and save preferences
Date dato = new Date();
System.out.println("el dato:"+dato);
prefs.edit().putLong(dateTimeKey, dato.getTime()).commit();