Firefox extension: How to inject javascript into page and run it?
- by el griz
I'm writing a Firefox extension to allow users to annotate any page with text and/or drawings and then save an image of the page including the annotations. Use cases would be clients reviewing web pages, adding feedback to the page, saving the image of this and emailing it back to the web developer or testers taking annotated screenshots of GUI bugs etc.
I wrote the annotation/drawing functionality in javascript before developing the extension. This script adds a <canvas> element to the page to draw upon as well as a toolbar (in a <div>) that contains buttons (each <canvas> elements) for the different draw tools e.g. line, box, ellipse, text, etc. This works fine when manually included in a page.
I now need a way for the extension to:
Inject this script into any page including pages I don't control.
This needs to occur when the user invokes the extension, which can be after the page has loaded.
Once injected the init() function in this script that adds the canvas and toolbar elements etc. needs to be run somehow, but I can't determine how to call this from the extension.
Note that once injected I don't need this script to interact with the extension (as the extension just takes a screenshot of the entire document (and removes the added page elements) when the user presses the save button in the extension chrome).