schoolbus

Drive around a browser iframe over multiple page requests using a postMessage bus.

example

In the page(s) you want to drive around, insert the browserified proxy.js file from this distribution:

$ browserify proxy.js -o proxy_bundle.js

<script src="/proxy_bundle.js"></script>

Ideally you could insert this script tag at the top of all text/html responses with a custom proxy but putting the tag in yourself manually works too.

Now you can boss those other pages around, like this:

var schoolbus = require('schoolbus');
var domready = require('domready');

domready(function () {
    var uri = 'http://localhost:7272/test-form/';
    var bus = schoolbus(uri, function (win, $) {
        console.log('href[0]=' + win.location.href);
        
        var form = $('#form')[0];
        $('input[name=login]').val('testling');
        $('input[name=passw]').val('qwerty');
        $('form').submit();
    });
    
    bus.next(function (win, $) {
        console.log('href[1]=' + win.location.href);
        console.log($('#welcome p:first').text());
    });
    
    bus.appendTo(document.body);
});

which when run against our particular pages will log the following output:

href[0]=http://localhost:7272/test-form/
href[1]=http://localhost:7272/test-form/login
Login successful.

Note that the code seems to have spanned multiple browser requests without resorting to a fancy webdriver-style plugin architecture and the API is entirely javascript-driven.

methods

var schoolbus = require('schoolbus')

var bus = schoolbus(uri, vars={}, cb)

Return a new bus starting at uri.

Optionally, you can specify some variables vars which will be sent over the postMessage bus using dnode-protocol so you can send circular objects and callbacks. Just don't try to send dom nodes.

If you specify a callback cb, then bus.next(cb) will register a listener when the page contents become available.

bus.next(cb)

Register a callback cb for the next available page transition.

Each transition fires a registered callback FIFO, so you can build up a queue of callbacks to script what happens when multiple pages are visited.

The cb will be stringified with .toString() and evaluated in the new page context, but with the variables bound when schoolbus() was called.

bus.navigate(uri)

Drive the bus to uri.

events

bus.on('open', loc)

Fired when a remote page loads in the iframe that has the proxy.js script. loc is a copy of the page's window.location object.

install

With npm do:

npm install schoolbus

then build proxy.js with browserify and drop it into the pages you want to drive around.

license

MIT