development.md

Development Guide

[简体中文版]

Start your own script

If you want to display your own online dictionary content, you need build the script by yourself. Because of security issues, currently the script can only run in HTML3 sandbox, but it's enough to complete your work.

Framework & Workflow

Basically, the extension will accept your browser word selection as input, pass it to your own dictionary script for online query, then get returned content and show it in browser popup window.

The dictionary script contains three parts:

1. Form an online dictionary query url pattern. In most cases, it's like http(s)://example.online.dictionary.com/search?word={your-word}
2. Perform online query by sending the url above, and get the web page content.
3. You may need to use Element/CSS selector (getElement(s)byXXX or querySelector(All)) to get the definition part you want.

Coding convention

1. First of all, you need wrap all of your online dictionary scraping code in a Class. To avoid duplicated declaration, you'd better not use a name too general.

   Important: To distinguish different language by displayname, you'd better use 2 digit country code for both source and target language as prefix, like encn_DictionryName for dictionary taking English as source and Chinese as target.

2. Second, in your dictionary Class, you need define at least one function named findTerm() , which accepts word as function parameter, return a Promise object. That's all.

Below is a script template to start your own coding.

Class YourClassName{
    constructor() {
        // Your code starting here ...
    }

    findTerm(word) {
        return new Promise((resolve, reject){
        // Your code starting here ...
        // resolve(content);
        // reject(error);
        });
    }
}

You can find the dictionary script source code sample under /src/dict of this repository.