Building Gmail/Chrome Extension with Vue.js and InboxSDK

We’re going to create a small Chrome extension that uses InboxSDK and Pipl to let you search email addresses for user information right in our Gmail. You can change this demo to use any Api that you like. For example you could:

• do a sentiment analysis using apis like aylien
• check the spam score of your email with spamcheck

You can clone the demo's git repository with:

git clone git@github.com:mikeeus/vue-demo-inboxsdk.git

Create the Chrome Exenstion

Creating a Chrome extension is surprisingly simple. First we need a manifest.json file that will describe our extension. You can find the Chrome manifest documentation here

// manifest.json
{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "name": "Vue Pipl Search",
  "version": "1.0",
  "permissions": [
    "https://mail.google.com/",
    "https://inbox.google.com/",
    "https://api.pipl.com/",
    "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/vue@2.5.17/dist/vue.js",
    "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/axios/0.18.0/axios.min.js"
  ],
  "content_scripts" : [
    {
      "matches": ["https://mail.google.com/*", "https://inbox.google.com/*"],
      "js": ["inboxsdk.js", "app.js"]
    }
  ],
  "web_accessible_resources": [
    "icon.png"
  ],
  "icons": {"128": "icon.png"}
}

We want to use the 2.0 version of the manifest. We'l call our extension "Vue Pipl Search" and make it version 1.0.

Since we want our extension to work on Gmail, we're going to add https://mail.google.com/ and https://inbox.google.com/ to our permissions. We'll also add pipl.com and our vue.js and axios.min.js cdn links because we'll be using them in our app.

Next we'll add a content_scripts key which tells Chrome that we want to run the inboxsdk.js and our app.js scripts when the brower is on mail.google.com or inbox.google.com.

Lastly we'll declare icon.png in the web_accessible_resources array and as our icon for the extension. Declaring it as web accessible allows us to load it later on using InboxSDK.

InboxSDK

Before we can use the InboxSDK we need an AppId which we can get from here. And we'll include the inboxsdk.js file which we can download from here.

Now let's create our app.js file which will use InboxSDK to add our extension to Gmail.

// app.js

InboxSDK.loadScript('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/vue@2.5.17/dist/vue.js')
InboxSDK.loadScript('https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/axios/0.18.0/axios.min.js')

// Load InboxSDK 1.0 using our AppID
InboxSDK.load('1.0', 'INBOX_SDK_APP_ID').then(function(sdk){
  // the SDK has been loaded
  // We want to register a view handler on the Compose view
  sdk.Compose.registerComposeViewHandler(function(composeView){
    // a compose view has come into existence, do something with it!
    composeView.addButton({
      title: "Vue Pipl Search",
      iconUrl: chrome.extension.getURL('icon.png'),
      onClick: function(event) {
        sdk.Widgets.showModalView({
          title: 'Vue Pipl Search',
          'el': `<div id="vue-pipl-search"></div>`,
        });

        // new Vue(...)
      },
    });
  });
});

Once the updated version of InboxSDK is loaded with InboxSDK.load we can use sdk.Compose to register a view handler and add a button on the Compose email view that will launch our Vue component. Inside the popup we'll render a div with id='vue-pipl-search' that will be picked up by the Vue component.

Vue Component

Now we can define our Vue component. We do this in the onClick handler so that it is defined after the #vue-pipl-search element exists on the page. Also we need a sample Api key from Pipl.

In order for the Vue component to get the email's recipients, we can use InboxSDK's composeView methods. composeView.getToRecipients() will return an array of the recipients, so we can get the email address with recipients[0].emailAddress.

Putting this together we get the following.

// app.js

InboxSDK.load('1.0', 'INBOX_SDK_APP_ID').then(function(sdk){
  sdk.Compose.registerComposeViewHandler(function(composeView){
    composeView.addButton({
      // ...
      onClick: function(event) {
        // ...

        const vuePiplSearch = new Vue({
          el: '#vue-pipl-search',
          template: `
            <div>
              <template v-if="recipients.length">
                <div v-if="person" style="text-align: center;">
                  <h2 style="text-align: center">
                    {{person.names[0].display}}
                  </h2>
                  <img :src="person.images[0].url" width="80px">
                  <p v-if="person.jobs[0]">{{person.jobs[0].title}}</p>
                </div>
                <div v-else>
                  Person was not found.
                </div>
              </template>
              <div v-else>
                Add an email recipient to search Pipl Api.
              </div>
            </div>
          `,

          data() {
            return {
              recipients: composeView.getToRecipients(),
              person: null
            }
          },

          created() {
            if (this.recipients.length) {
              this.loading = true

              axios.get(`https://api.pipl.com/search/v5/?email=${this.recipients[0].emailAddress}&key=[PIPL_SAMPLE_KEY]`)
                .then(res => {
                  if (res.status === 200) {
                    this.person = res.data.person;
                    this.loading = false
                  }
                })
            }
          }
        })
      },
    });
  });
});

When the component is created we check for recipients then make a request to Pipl. We store the result in the data property which will render in the template.

This is super simple, but we can expand on it to add error handling or support for multiple recipients.

If we want to use a different Api or have a different use case we can use methods like composeView.getHTMLContent() to get the email body and send that to an Api.

Check out the docs for more ideas.

Loading Extension

To run our extension we need to load it. We can zip our project and load it that way, but for this tutorial we'll just load the unpacked folder. From Chrome's extension page select 'Load Unpacked` at the top left and navigate to the extensions folder then select okay. This will add the extension to chrome.

Now if you navigate to gmail.com and compose an email, you'll see the Vue icon.

Add "clark.kent@example.com" as the email recipient and click on the icon. A modal should open up with our Vue component in it, hooray! It searches the Pipl Api and returns the person.

Magic! Now you can begin your PI career like a boss!

Don't forget to like if you enjoyed this tutorial. Leave a comment below if you have any questions. :)