In an older post, I had written about a command that lets you insert links by searching for selected text, without leaving the current page. This post is about the technical details.
To understand the details, you would need to understand the basics of authoring a ubiquity command. The code above shows the preview and the execute function. Interestingly, the "this" reference points to the current object only in the execute function. Hence, to pass data between the two, I used the setGlobal and get Global methods that internally set values as attributes of the window object.
Another interesting thing is the way double-clicking works in Firefox. The trailing space is also selected and making that a part of the link does not look good.
I tried out YAHOO BOSS and wrote the search function using it. The response JSON is rendered by the render function.
Another point to note is the way modifiers work. If nothing is specified as the modifier, the modified["word"].text carries the same value as the input text. Hence, the modifiers, along with the input text has to be sanitized.
Another problem I faced was the number of times the preview function was called. There were times when the input to the preview function also had the modifier attached. Making so many searches, with the modifier attached was not good and hence, only the selected text rather than the input is the search query parameter.
Finally, I am also working on using the input text if no text is selected, and using text links if they are directly specified by the user.
