globals

Globals in this section are subject to change in the future and/or are likely to be of interest to SDK module developers, rather than add-on developers.

Components

To access the infamous and powerful Components object, see the Chrome Authority documentation.

__url__

The __url__ global is a string identifying the URL from which the code has been retrieved. If the code has no identifiable URL, this value may be null.

packaging

For more information on packaging, see the Package Specification appendix.

The packaging global contains methods and metadata related to the packages available in the current environment.

packaging.getURLForData(path)

Given a unix-style path relative to the calling package's data directory, returns an absolute URL to the file or directory.

By "calling package", we mean the package in which the caller's source code resides.

Thus, for example, if a package contains a resource at data/mydata.dat and a module at lib/foo.js, the module at lib/foo.js may make the following call to retrieve an absolute URL to data/mydata.dat:

var myDataURL = packaging.getURLForData("/mydata.dat");

If the calling package has no data directory, an exception is thrown.

memory

memory is an object that exposes functionality to track objects of interest and help diagnose and prevent memory leaks.

memory.track(object, [bin])

Marks object for being tracked, and categorizes it with the given bin name. If bin isn't specified, the memory tracker attempts to infer a bin name by first checking the object's constructor.name; if that fails or results in the generic Object, the stack is inspected and the name of the current function being executed—which is assumed to be a constructor function—is used. If that fails, then the object is placed in a bin named generic.

memory.getObjects([bin])

Returns an Array containing information about tracked objects that have been categorized with the given bin name. If bin isn't provided, information about all live tracked objects are returned.

Each element of the array is an object with the following keys:

weakref A weak reference to the object being tracked. Call get() on this object to retrieve its strong reference; if a strong reference to the object no longer exists, get() will return null.
created A Date representing the date and time that memory.track() was called on the object being tracked.
filename The name of the file that called memory.track() on the object being tracked.
lineNo The line number of the file that called memory.track() on the object being tracked.

memory.getBins()

Returns an Array containing the names of all bins that aren't currently empty.