Listening for HTTP requests and displaying a count pattern

[raed667]

I'm building an extension that listen for HTTP requests in the background/worker and then displays the number of requests in the badge.

Sounds easy enough, but we have to keep a counter per tab. Also if the website in the tab changes, the counter needs to be reset to zero.

// background 
chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener((details) => {
  	// logic goes here
  },
  { urls: ['https://*.example.com/*'] },
  ['requestBody', 'extraHeaders']
);

I store the count in a global variable and then use setBadgeText, but i have to detect tabs.onUpdated and figure out if a URL change is real or an SPA etc.. and every day i discover an edge case.

I feel like this should be something commun, am I missing something obvious ?

[aklinker1]

Not that I know of, sorry lol. Extension development can be tedious like this...

[raed667]

@aklinker1 ok sooo it turns out i was already handling every use-case except one. The worker shutting down.

When the worker becomes inactive, the variable i was storing my count in is disposed of.

[aklinker1]

Yeah, you'll have to persist the count to storage, and probably use a mutex to make sure you don't mis-count.

[raed667]

or spam the chrome.runtime.getPlatformInfo function in an interval and prevent the worker from sleeping .. 🤷

[aklinker1]

Yup lol