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PixieBrix Documentation
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Working with Page State

What is Page State?

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This documentation is about setting state locally in your browser. If you need to set data that’s accessible to multiple team members or across page loads, use PixieBrix’s Team and User Database features

Page State is used to track data for reuse across extensions and runs of a single extension on the page. Common uses of Page State are:

  • Track if an extension has already run on the page, e.g., to prevent it from running again
  • Collect information from actions to show in a side panel
  • Pass context to a page opened with the Open New Tab brick (also see
    🤹‍♀️
    Multi-Page Automation
    )

Page State Structure

The Page State is an object with properties and values. A value can be of any type, including nested objects and arrays.

Page State Bricks

There are two bricks for working with Page State:

Isolating State with Namespaces

The namespace field controls which extensions/blueprints have access to the Page State. The primary purpose of namespace is to prevent other extensions from overwriting/corrupting the page state used by your extension/blueprint

  • Shared: can be access by any extension/blueprint
  • Blueprint (default): extensions in the same blueprint. If the extension is not part of a blueprint, behaves the same as shared. Use this to coordinate across extensions
  • Extension: use this to track state for a single extension across runs

Merge Strategy

The mergeStrategy of the “Set shared page state” brick controls how the values provided impact existing values:

  • Shallow (default): properties provided overwrite existing properties. Other properties are preserved
  • Replace: replace the page state with the new values
  • Deep: merge properties, including nested objects. For arrays, items are merged pairwise. If two values are different types, the value is replaced

Example: Replace State

Before:

hasRun: false
message: "Some text"

Update

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After

# The message field is removed, because the whole state is replaces
hasRun: true

Example: Shallow Merge

Before

hasRun: false
message: "Some text"

Update

image

After

hasRun: true
# The `message` key is not modified
message: "Some text"

Example: Deep Merge

ℹ️

In “deep” merge mode, arrays items are merged together pair-wise. (They are not appended)

Before: State

hasRun: false
exampleObject:
  key1: "Text value"

Before: @data

exampleObject:
  key2: "Key from @data object"

Update

image

After

hasRun: false
exampleObject:
  key1: "Text value"
  # key2 is deep merged into exampleObject
  key2: "Key from @data object"

Common Patterns

Run Extension Once

To run an extension at most once, use the page state to track if the extension has been run.

In this example, we’ll set a hasExtensionRun property on the extension’s state.

Use the Get shared page state brick to get the extension state. NOTE: use the “extension” namespace to isolate the state to this trigger

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Cancel the trigger if the extension has already been run by passing @state.hasExtensionRun for the condition:

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When the extension has run, set the shared page state. Be sure to use the same namespace as used in the “Get shared page state” step:

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Show Action Information in Sidebar Panel

This pattern uses two extensions:

  1. A context menu/button/trigger to fetch information
  2. A sidebar panel to show the information

In the first extension, fetch some data and store the data in the shared Page State with the the “Set shared page state brick”. Optional use the “Show Sidebar” brick to automatically open the PixieBrix sidebar:

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When using Page State to pass information between related extensions, use the blueprint namespace

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In the Sidebar Panel extension, use the “Get shared page state” brick to get the state from the button:

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In the panel, make sure to handle the case where the state has not been set yet. For example, use if/else tags in the template:

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Append to an Array

In this pattern, the state will have an arrayExample property that will track our array.

Get the shared page state

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Use the jq brick to append to the array:

(.state.arrayExample // []) + [.data]

The // [] is used to handle the initial state of arrayExample, where arrayExample is undefined because it has not been saved yet

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Set the shared page state using the outputKey of the previous step:

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