Text selection and display in context menu chrome extension

Question

I have been working on a small Chrome extension with a problem I cant seem to get my head around and would appreciate someone to look at it with a fresh perspective.

Answer 1

UPDATE

I just looked at the docs and all this can be done much more simpler without any content scripts and callbacks:

chrome.contextMenus.create({
    title: "Test %s menu item", 
    contexts:["selection"], 
    onclick: function(info, tab) {
        sendSearch(info.selectionText);
    }
});

That's all you need, because you can use %s in menu title to get selected text.

(everything below is not needed anymore)

---

Your getSelection() method doesn't return selected text, it just injects a content script to a page. Selected text is received sometime later in onRequest and then passed to a callback function from your callback array as a parameter.

So this part:

var tx = getSelection();
var title = "Test '" + tx + "' menu item";
var id = chrome.contextMenus.create({"title": title, "contexts":[selection],
                                   "onclick": sendSearch(tx)});
console.log("selection item:" + id);

needs to be changed to something like this:

getSelection(function(tx) { 
    var title = "Test '" + tx + "' menu item";
    var id = chrome.contextMenus.create({"title": title, "contexts":["selection"],
                                       "onclick": sendSearch(tx)});
    console.log("selection item:" + id);
})

But I would get rid of that selection_callbacks array altogether as I think it is not needed:

chrome.extension.onRequest.addListener(function (request) { 
    var tx = request;
    var title = "Test '" + tx + "' menu item";
    var id = chrome.contextMenus.create({"title": title, "contexts":["selection"],
                                       "onclick": sendSearch(tx)});
    console.log("selection item:" + id);
});

Also note that "contexts":[selection] needs to be "contexts":["selection"], and "onclick": sendSearch(tx) needs to be something like this instead:

"onclick": function(info, tab) {
    sendSearch(info.selectionText);
}