summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 09:22:09 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 09:22:09 +0000
commit43a97878ce14b72f0981164f87f2e35e14151312 (patch)
tree620249daf56c0258faa40cbdcf9cfba06de2a846 /devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md
parentInitial commit. (diff)
downloadfirefox-upstream.tar.xz
firefox-upstream.zip
Adding upstream version 110.0.1.upstream/110.0.1upstream
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md')
-rw-r--r--devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md39
1 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md b/devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..c43fef29a7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/devtools/docs/contributor/backend/actor-registration.md
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+# How to register an actor
+
+## Target-scoped actors vs. global actors
+
+Target-scoped actors are the most common types of actors. That's the type of actors you will most probably be adding.
+
+Target-scoped actors target a document, this could be a tab in Firefox or a remote document in Firefox for Android.
+
+Global actors however are for the rest, for things not related to any particular document but instead for things global to the whole Firefox/Chrome/Safari instance the toolbox is connected to (e.g. the preference actor).
+
+## The ActorRegistry.registerModule function
+
+To register a target-scoped actor:
+
+```
+ActorRegistry.registerModule("devtools/server/actors/webconsole", {
+ prefix: "console",
+ constructor: "WebConsoleActor",
+ type: { target: true }
+});
+```
+
+To register a global actor:
+
+```
+ActorRegistry.registerModule("devtools/server/actors/preference", {
+ prefix: "preference",
+ constructor: "PreferenceActor",
+ type: { global: true }
+});
+```
+
+If you are adding a new built-in actor, you should be registering it using `ActorRegistry.registerModule` in `addBrowserActors` or `addTargetScopedActors` in `/devtools/server/actors/utils/actor-registry.js`.
+
+## A note about lazy registration
+
+The `ActorRegistry` loads and creates all of the actors lazily to keep the initial memory usage down (which is extremely important on lower end devices).
+
+It becomes especially important when debugging pages with e10s when there are more than one process, because that's when we need to spawn a `DevToolsServer` per process (it may not be immediately obvious that the server in the main process is mostly only here for piping messages to the actors in the child process).