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YNAB Toolkit Development

The src/extension folder holds all the source code for the YNAB Toolkit.

The folder structure is as such:

src/extension/
├── features/
├── listeners/
└── utils/

features/: Contains sub-directories for each section of the YNAB application and house the source code for each individual feature. This is where most development will take place.

listeners/: Contains some of the base functionality for triggering life-cycle methods of a Toolkit Feature which can be tapped into by implementing the Feature class.

utils/: Contains any helpers shared code for the Toolkit such as looking up Ember views or normalizing currency values.

Writing Your First Feature

It is very easy to get started with your first feature. In order to do so, follow these steps:

  1. Determine where your feature belongs in YNAB (accounts/budget/general). Note the reports/ folder is meant for any features meant to modify native YNAB Reports. If you wish to add a new report or modify existing Toolkit Reports, those changes belong in the toolkit-reports/ folder.
  2. Create a sub-directory for your feature in the respective folder. Try to name the folder the same as you will name the class. The name of the folder for the following example would be my-cool-feature.
  3. Create an index.js file which has the following: 
import { Feature } from 'toolkit/extension/features/feature';

export class MyCoolFeature extends Feature {
  shouldInvoke() {
    return true;
  }

  invoke() {
    console.log('MyCoolFeature is working!');
  }
}
  1. Create a settings.js file which has the following: 
module.exports = {
  name: 'MyCoolFeature',
  type: 'checkbox',
  default: false,
  section: 'budget',
  title: 'My Cool Feature!',
  description: 'This is my brand new feature.',
};
  1. Run yarn build:development or yarn watch to build the extension for all the browsers.
  2. In Chrome, go to chrome://extensions and turn on "Developer mode". Then "Load unpacked extension". Select /dist/extension/ and it will load into chrome.
  3. Reload YNAB!

In order to help you develop cool features, we've created a few API functions that you get for free when extending Feature.

The Feature Class

The following functions can be declared inside your Feature Class.

constructor()

optional function, not required to be declared

Your feature's constructor is invoked as soon as the Toolkit is injected onto the page. You should not attempt a DOM manipulation or access to Ember/YNAB as it is not guaranteed or likely to be ready when your constructor is invoked. The job of the base Feature constructor is to simply fetch the user settings of your feature. If enabled is set to false for your Feature's settings, then invoke will not be called.

willInvoke(): <void|Promise>

optional function, not required to be declared

willInvoke() is an optional hook that you can define in your class that allows you to run synchronous or asynchronous code before your feature is invoked. If you choose to run asynchronous code, just return a promise from willInvoke().

Note that willInvoke() runs before shouldInvoke() runs and does not care about the return value of shouldInvoke().

Running Balance is an example of why you would want to use this. Running Balance runs over all transactions in every account to initialize the running balance calculation. If this weren't done before we invoked, there's a chance users would not see any data in the running balance column.

shouldInvoke(): boolean

optional function, not required to be declared

shouldInvoke is called immediately once the page and YNAB is ready. This function should perform a synchronous operation to determine whether or not your feature should be invoked. You can also use this function in your observe(), or onRouteChanged() functions to determine whether or not you should invoke.

Example:

import { isCurrentRouteBudgetPage } from 'toolkit/extension/utils/ynab';

...

shouldInvoke() {
  return isCurrentRouteBudgetPage();
}

invoke(): void

optional function, not required to be declared

Invoke is called immediately once the page and YNAB is ready and shouldInvoke() returns true. This is the entrypoint of your feature. You can be certain that at this point, the page is ready for manipulation and YNAB is loaded.

injectCSS()

optional function, not required to be declared

injectCSS is called only once when the feature is instantiated, and its job is to return any global CSS styles you'd like to have placed in a <style> tag in the <head> of the page.

For example, a CSS based feature to hide the referral program banner would look like this:

index.js

import { Feature } from 'toolkit/core/feature';

export class HideReferralBanner extends Feature {
  injectCSS() {
    return require('./index.css');
  }
}

index.css

div.referral-program {
  display: none;
}

You can get ahold of the css string you need however you like at runtime, just be aware that YNAB itself isn't loaded yet. This feature is designed to be used statically for styles that don't change that your feature requires on the page.

observe(changedNodes: Set): void

optional function, not required to be declared

Observe will be called every time there's a change to the DOM. The underlying code of observe uses a Mutation Observer. Once a change is detected from the DOM, we iterate over every node and add the class attribute from the underylying element to a Set. ember-view is stripped from every class name to reduce complexity.

Note that it is extremely likely to receive many calls to observe when things change on the page and not all changes are sent in the first request. It is for this reason that you should make necessary checks before doing any actual work. For example by calling this.shouldInvoke() or checking for required node in changedNodes.

Example:

observe(changedNodes) {
  if (!this.shouldInvoke()) return;

  if (changedNodes.has('element-class-i-care-about')) {
    this.invoke();
  }
}

onRouteChanged(currentRoute: string): void

optional function, not required to be declared

OnRouteChanged is designed to be called every time the user navigates to a new page. In order to do this, we've implemented an Ember Observer which watches for changes to the following attributes:

  • currentRouteName: Any time the Ember router changes the underlying controller or view, this gets changed. (ie: Accounts -> Budget or vise versa). This does not change if you just simply switch which account you're looking at.

  • budgetVersionId: This will change if the user switches to an entirely different budget. This can be done natively by going through the three page budget swap flow or with the Toolkit 'Quck Budget Switch' feature.

  • selectedAccountId: This handles the case where a user is just flipping through accounts but still remaining on the 'accounts' route.

  • monthString: This handles the case where the user is flipping through months on the budget page.

When one of these things are changed, your onRouteChanged handler will get called with the name of the route the user is currently on. More often than not a simple call to this.shouldInvoke() is all that you need to determine if you care about the route change.

For convenience, we send in the currentRoute. Your shouldInvoke function likely grabs this value itself and checks against it which is fine. It is recommended that you always use shouldInvoke in these listener functions to avoid unnecessary processing so feel free to ignore the passed in value and just call this.shouldInvoke if it's all that you need to determine if you care about the route change.

Example:

onRouteChanged() {
  if (!this.shouldInvoke()) return;

  this.invoke();
}