One of the nice features that we added to the add-ons manager in Firefox 4 was support for custom add-on types that could be treated the same way as the built-in types, even showing up in the same UI if you did a little work. I blogged a basic example of how to do this and I know since then Greasemonkey and Stylish have been using the support.

A few days ago (and now in Aurora builds) I landed some improvements that simplify the hardest part of this, making the UI appear.

# Registering a custom type

Previously in order to add a new type of add-on and have it appear in the add-ons manager you would have to do two things, first tell the add-ons manager module that you supported add-ons and secondly manually create some elements in the UI to allow the user to view them. These two things have now been combined:

AddonManagerPrivate.registerProvider(myProvider, [{
  id: "scripts",
  name: "User Scripts",
  uiPriority: 3500,
  viewType: AddonManager.VIEW_TYPE_LIST
}]);

This registers the provider as before but also tells the module that your provider supports an AddonType with the ID “scripts” and some other information. The documentation explains a little more about the properties. You’ll note it passes an array to allow for providers registering multiple types.

Currently you only need to do this if you want your add-on types to show up in the UI, however we may start requiring providers to register their types to help speed up some of the API calls. If you want to register your type and not have the UI automatically show it just don’t give it a viewType.

# Breaking changes

Some of the changes we had to make may have broken some add-ons that have been doing this the hard way in the past. Here are the once I’ve identified and some ways to work around the problems:

# Types must be registered

The UI now requires that if you’re displaying your add-ons in the regular list view then it must have been registered. If you only care about supporting Firefox 6 and higher then you can just remove your code for adding your type to the category list, if you want to support both then you should either only do that on versions before Firefox 6, or you could always manually add your type to the UI but also register your type with no viewType.

# Some IDs changed in the UI

We made some changes to the IDs of elements in the add-ons manager UI, we dropped the “s” on the end of the type selectors. category-extensions became category-extension as an example.

# Category items aren’t in the UI immediately

Because we now build the list of types to display in the UI (even the built-in types use the same type registration I’ve talked about here), the elements for those types aren’t in the UI until after the main initialize function for the window has completed. If you try to use overlays that refer to those elements or if you run script that tries to find these elements before the initialize function completes (it is a load event listener) then they won’t exist and you’ll probably find things broken.