Status

Under Consideration

Problem Summary

Currently there are no mechanisms available for browser plug-ins to add plug-in specific data into the crash dumps reported by browsers. Additional information added by browser plug-ins will facilitate easier and faster trouble shooting of plug-ins. This necessitates browsers to provide interfaces through which plug-in can indicate to the browser, plug-in specific data that it needs browser to capture as part of crash dumps in case a crash occurs.The NPAPI doesn’t have any interfaces to send plug-in’s custom data along with crash dump when an Unhandled exception occurs in the plug-in. To support this we are proposing an extension to the current API.

Existing Discussions and Documentation

API Requirements

Current Proposal

Last modified: March 31st, 2011
Authors: Sandeep Akula(Adobe Systems)/Vinod Menon(Adobe Systems)
Contributors:

The current proposal is to add two new methods for registering and unregistering memory blocks

NPError NPN_ErrorReportingRegisterMemoryBlock(
const char* key, 
unit flags,
void* pMemBlock, 
size_t sizeOfMemBlock);

Parameters:
* key – unique string identifying the memory block
* flags - NPMEM_CHARACTER_DATA - the data is character data which can be <br>presented as 	UTF8/ASCII data NPMEM_NOT_PERSONAL - the data is guaranteed to not contain any <br>	personally identifying information such as URLs, cookie data, etc
* pMemBlock   - The starting address of the memory block
* sizeOfMemBlock – The size of the memory block in bytes

Return Value:
* NPERR_OUT_OF_MEMORY_ERROR - If the memory size exceeds the maximum size allowed
* NPERR_INVALID_PARAM - If the registration fails
* NPERR_NO_ERROR - If successful

If the API is called with same key that was registered earlier, then API call with

succeed and call will override the old pointer and length values.

Plugin is allowed to register as many memory blocks as it wants
NPN_GetValue with key "NPNVmaxCrashMemoryBlockSize" can be used to get the maximum

block size that could be registered

NPError NPN_ErrorReportingUnregisterMemoryBlock(const char* key); 

Parameters:
* key - key value which was used to register the memory block

Return Value:
* NPERR_INVALID_PARAM  - If un registration fails
* NPERR_NO_ERROR - If un resgitation succeeds

Open Issues

We need to check with browser vendor crash reporting teams to make sure we can handle arbitrary blocks of memory. Right now, for example, I think Mozilla is only set up to handle string annotations and I'm not sure what additional challenges random memory will pose.

NPAPI:ErrorReporting

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