How to access BrowserWindow Javascript global from main process in electron?

Lily B picture Lily B · Jun 6, 2015 · Viewed 39.1k times · Source

I want a menu, defined in the main process to call JS code inside the current browser window in an atom/electron application.

Getting main process globals form the browser window is

const remote = require('remote')
const foo    = remote.getGlobal('foo')

What is the equivalent for the main process (aka get current window globals). This is what I want to do in pseudo-code

// JS inside main process
const BrowserWindow = require('browser-window')
//...
// Inside the menu callback
let window    = BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow()
let commander = window.global('commander') /// <---- PSEUDO-CODE !!!
commander.handleCommand('File.Save')

Answer

Josh picture Josh · Jun 10, 2015

Here is a reference to your comment about the webContents process in the api, in the "Note:" under remotes.

However, if you just want to trigger a function, you could also use the webContents.send() and ipc(main process) processes to trigger the appropriate code to run. Something like this...

// JS inside main process
const window = require('electron').BrowserWindow;

ipc.on('menuItem-selected', function(){
    let focusedWindow    = window.getFocusedWindow();
    focusedWindow.webContents.send('file-save');
});

// Inside the menu callback
require('ipc').on('file-save', function() {
  // File save function call here
});

Update:

For Electron version 0.35.0 and above, the ipc api changed to the following:

// In main process.
const ipcMain = require('electron').ipcMain;

// In renderer process (web page).
const ipcRenderer = require('electron').ipcRenderer;