分类: 系统运维
2008-04-06 13:47:26
Our first user script simply displays an alert saying “Hello world!” when it is executed.
Although this code looks obvious enough, and does exactly what you would expect, Greasemonkey is actually doing a number of things behind the scenes to ensure that user scripts do not interact badly with other scripts defined by the original page. Specifically, it automatically wraps your user script in an anonymous function wrapper. Ordinarily you can ignore this, but it will eventually creep up and bite you in the ass, so you may as well learn about it now.
One of the most common ways this can bite you is that variables and functions that you define in a user script are not available to other scripts. In fact, they are not available at all once the user script has finished running. This means
that you will run into problems if you are expecting to be able to call your own functions later by using the window.setTimeout
function, or by setting string-based onclick
attributes on links and expecting Javascript to evaluate your function names later.
For example, this user script defines a function helloworld
, then attempts to set a timer to call it one second later.
function helloworld() {
alert('Hello world!');
}
window.setTimeout("helloworld()", 60);
This will not work; no alert will be displayed. If you open , you will see an exception displayed: Error: helloworld is not defined.
This is because, by the time the timeout expires and the call to helloworld()
is evaluated, the helloworld
function no longer exists.
If you need to reference your user script's variables or functions later, you will need to explicitly define them as properties
of the window
object, which is always available.
window.helloworld = function() {
alert('Hello world!');
}
window.setTimeout("helloworld()", 60);
This works as expected: one second after the page loads, an alert pops up proudly displaying “Hello world!”
However, setting properties on window
is still not ideal; it's a bit like using a global variable when a local one will do. (Actually, it's exactly like that,
since window
is global and available to all scripts on the page.) More practically, you could end up interfering with other scripts that
were defined on the page, or even other user scripts.
The best solution is to define an anonymous function yourself and pass it as the first argument to window.setTimeout
.
window.setTimeout(function() { alert('Hello world!') }, 60);
What I'm doing here is creating a function without a name (an “anonymous function”), then immediately passing the function itself to window.setTimeout
. This accomplishes the same thing as the previous example, but it leaves no trace, i.e. it's undetectable to other scripts.
I find that I use anonymous functions regularly while writing user scripts. They are ideal for creating “one-off” functions and passing them as arguments to things like window.setTimeout
, document.addEventListener
, or assigning to event handlers like click
or submit
.