Not a Bug: using in Electron

[JMS-1]

Just in brief a report on what I did to make it work with electron 1.8.4 - actually there may be better approaches since I'm not that deep into the matter. At least as a Proof-Of-Concept it works, configuration might be a big issue. But here we go (in brief!):

• electron does not support chrome.extension.sendMessage and chrome.extension.onMessage which are both deprecated by the way. I had to use chrome.runtime instead of chrome.extension as MDN suggests.
• is seems as if electron does not support background pages. Using Process Monitor on Windows 10 I could see that background.js is loaded but it seems to not get executed. So here comes the work-around in hope for better times.
• I removed background.js from the manifest.json (although since it's not working this may not be necessary) and integrated it into script.js. Actually there is some fine tuning and I will give the details if someone needs it. More or less I encapsulated the background.js in a function which is called when the extension starts and replaced chrome.extension(runtime).sendMessage with a delayed (setTimeout(,0)) chrome.runtime.onMessage.emit. This is not really clean but seems to work as expected.
• Two incompatibility corrections for the Chrome version (59) used in electron 1.8.4 (no InputEvent class) and a missing chrome.tabs (could be since my app is running in kiosk mode could be a electron issue but doesn't matter for me) and I got the keyboard running.

If there is any better way I would really like to hear about it!

Jochen

PS: Forked the changes at https://github.com/JMS-1/chrome-virtual-keyboard. Sorry for the script.js mess due to the the reformatting (space/tabs): it's NOT that big of a change!

[subvertallchris]

This is very useful, thank you for sharing it! I can't find any documentation about those two deprecations. Could you link to something?