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I've been making a plugin for browsers (Safari, Chrome, firefox) in MacOSX

What I try to do is using Accessibility API to find out the size and the origin for the Browser Window in my NPAPI plugin.

In Chrome, I can get what I want but In Safari, got a error code -25204.

 AXUIElementRef app = AXUIElementCreateApplication( browserProcessID );

 AXUIElementRef frontWindow = NULL;
 AXError err = AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(
                       app, kAXMainWindowAttribute, (CFTypeRef *)&frontWindow );

 if ( err != kAXErrorSuccess ) {
      NSLog(@"%d", err);
      return -1;
 }

-25204 is kAXErrorCannotComplete in AXError.h

But I do not know why.

Any comments will be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Yuji
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neochoon
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    Why do you need the origin and the size of the browser window, what do you want to do with them? – Yuji Nov 25 '10 at 04:43
  • I want to cover the browser with my window which has my plugin. So user can not recognize that there are two windows. – neochoon Nov 29 '10 at 08:56
  • I think that's a very fragile method. If you need to create the images in another process (do you?), why not use e.g. shared memory to exchange the data with the plugin? – Georg Fritzsche Nov 29 '10 at 13:19
  • FYI, the new Java Plugin2 from Apple used this method during its early development, and it proved so problematic that they eventually abandoned it. Keeping your window at the right layer relative to multiple browser windows, for example, is going to be problematic. When I suggested using a separate window as a short-term solution I meant a window that the user can see and interact with. – smorgan Nov 29 '10 at 14:18

1 Answers1

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Given your other question on this site I'm guessing what you are actually trying to accomplish is to find out where a plugin is on screen. All you need for that is to use NPN_ConvertPoint to find where the plugin's (0,0) is in screen coordinates. That will be much easier and much less fragile than trying to use accessibility (and will actually give you the right answer; with the accessibility you will have to make assumptions about window toolbar heights, which are variable).

smorgan
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  • Thank you so much! I tried CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo api but NPN_ConvertPoint is just what I try to find. I really appreciate it. – neochoon Nov 29 '10 at 08:51