Enable the devtools per iframe

[hwillson]

Migrated from: #120

With pages that contain iframes, such as codesandbox, we should be able to access the Apollo Client instance for an embedded iframe.

[patryk-smc]

Yes please. This is big deal when building embedded Shopify apps.

[donnellyjoe]

This would also be great for aiding development of UI components within storybook 👍

[boehlkers]

Hi @hwillson - I’ve come across this as a requirement in a project I’m working on and addressing it would be a huge QoL improvement. Would you be open to a PR that implements this (by checking for the existence of any window.__APOLLO_CLIENT__ instance in any embedded iframe on the page on extension startup)?

The only concern I could see is in the case where multiple instances appear on the same page within different iframes. But as long as we prioritize the top-level window.__APOLLO_CLIENT__ instance there should be no change to any existing functioning use cases.

[karthikiyengar]

by checking for the existence of any window.APOLLO_CLIENT instance in any embedded iframe on the page on extension startup

I'm not sure that would work for iframes where the Same-Origin Policy is not honoured.

(Correction: all_frames should kinda do it)

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It seems like React DevTools gets around this by packaging a standalone Electron version that allows connections using WebSockets. An approach like this would help us support Chrome extensions as well, as requested here: #382

I haven't explored how much of an effort it would be to package this as an Electron app, has this been considered?

[karthikiyengar]

I was playing around with what's possible and it looks like we can achieve this by using allFrames: true on the content script. We might have to rework the messaging a bit to also include an iframe identifier, potentially allowing us to select the window we want to use DevTools with. Thoughts, @hwillson ?

[karthikiyengar]

Draft PR here

[torressam333]

Did this ever make it to prod? Are we able to invoke dev tools as an executable script?

[jerelmiller]

@torressam333 not yet! It's on the short list of next upcoming things to get in place. We've been putting some effort recently to ensure the devtools is more stable first as we've had a lot of reports that it just refuses to work at all. Once we feel good about that, that should free us up to add these features. Hopefully sooner than later!