How to get an nsIGlobalObject* from a JSContext*

I’m working on a patch for bug 1116188 to make gathering profiles from subprocesses asynchronous. In order to do that, I’m exposing a new method on nsIProfiler called getProfileDataAsync that is returning a DOM Promise. What’s interesting about this is that I’m returning a DOM Promise from C++! ¹

In order to construct a DOM Promise in C++, I need to hand it something that implements nsIGlobalObject. I suspect that this helps the Promise determine which memory region that it belongs to.

My new method gets a JSContext* because I’ve got the [implicit_jscontext] bit about the method definition in the nsIProfiler.idl file… so how do I go about turning that into an nsIGlobalObject?

Here’s the maneuver:

// Where aCX is your JSContext*:
nsIGlobalObject* go = xpc::NativeGlobal(JS::CurrentGlobalOrNull(aCx));

That will, as the name suggests, return either an nsIGlobalObject*, or a nullptr.

Resolving a DOM Promise from C++ with a JS Object

For my patch for bug 1116188, it’s all well and good to create a DOM Promise, but you have to resolve or reject that Promise for it to have any real value.

In my case, I wanted to take a string, parse it into a JS Object, and resolve with that.

Resolving or rejecting a DOM Promise in Javascript is pretty straight-forward – you’re given back resolve / reject function, and you just need to call those with your results and you’re done.

In C++, things get a little hairier. As I discovered in my most recent episode of The Joy of Coding, conditions need to be right in order for this to work out.

Here’s what I ended up doing (I’ve simplified the method somewhat to remove noise):

void
ProfileGatherer::Finish()
{
  AutoJSAPI jsapi;
  jsapi.Init();
  JSContext* cx = jsapi.cx();
  JSAutoCompartment ac(cx, mPromise->GlobalJSObject());

  // Now parse the JSON so that we resolve with a JS Object.
  JS::RootedValue val(cx);
  {
    UniquePtr<char[]> buf = mWriter.WriteFunc()->CopyData();
    NS_ConvertUTF8toUTF16 js_string(nsDependentCString(buf.get()));
    MOZ_ALWAYS_TRUE(JS_ParseJSON(cx, static_cast<const char16_t*>(js_string.get()),
                                 js_string.Length(), &val));
  }
  mPromise->MaybeResolve(val);
}

The key parts here are getting the AutoJSAPI on the stack, initting it, gettings its JSContext, and then putting the JSAutoCompartment on the stack. Note that I had to pass not only the JSContext, but the global JS Object for the Promise as well – I suspect that’s, again, to ensure that the right compartment is being entered. Otherwise, I start failing assertions like crazy.

Note that the code above is by no means perfect – I’m missing error handling functions for when the JSON parsing goes wrong. In that case, I should probably reject the Promise instead. bz pointed me to a good example of that going on here in Fetch.cpp:

      if (!JS_ParseJSON(cx, decoded.get(), decoded.Length(), &json)) {
        if (!JS_IsExceptionPending(cx)) {
          localPromise->MaybeReject(NS_ERROR_DOM_UNKNOWN_ERR);
          return;
        }

        JS::Rooted<JS::Value> exn(cx);
        DebugOnly<bool> gotException = JS_GetPendingException(cx, &exn);
        MOZ_ASSERT(gotException);

        JS_ClearPendingException(cx);
        localPromise->MaybeReject(cx, exn);
        return;
      }

      localPromise->MaybeResolve(cx, json);
      return;

I’ll probably end up doing something similar in the next iteration of my patch.

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1. I learned how to do that a few weeks back. ↩