send data from Thunderbird to Firefox - how?

[Frank R. Suchy]

Hi all,

is there a convenient way to send data from Thunderbird to Firefox?

My extension T should send some data from a mail body to Firefox where
another extension F picks it up and calls a web page and fills a form
accoridngly.

I don't want to use the clipboard.
So I guess I have to write a file somewhere...

- is there some direct way for Thunderbird and Firefox to communicate
with each other?

- How can T notify Firefox of new data?
- I'm not yet familiar with using the filesystem from extensions...
- how can T find out about Firefox's profile folder(s)?

Many thanks in advance!
Frank

[white...@fastmail.us]

Frank,

My addon, ThunderbirdBiff does something along these lines. It uses a
socket connection for IPC.

David

[Eric H. Jung]

----- Original Message ----
> From: Frank R. Suchy <such...@gmx.de>

> - is there some direct way for Thunderbird and Firefox to communicate
> with each other?
>
> - How can T notify Firefox of new data?
> - I'm not yet familiar with using the filesystem from extensions...
> - how can T find out about Firefox's profile folder(s)?

You could use standard cross-platform inter-process communication mechanisms--sockets come to mind--but there's no guarantee that Firefox is running and listening on the socket when you want to send it data.

[white...@fastmail.us]

This is true but I "solved" it by having TB create the listener socket
and having FF connect to it. This way, if FF starts before TB, the
socket connection fails - it then retries periodically. If TB starts
before FF, it knows that it has no clients and can simply avoid trying
to send anything. It all works pretty well in my addon.