Filter Object: Addon

[jaredlockhart]

We need a filter object for filtering for the presence of an addon by its addon id. I think if we want to exclude an addon we will have to combine this with #2105

[uhlissuh]

@mythmon @rehandalal, I have a few questions about this one.

I see two different representations of addons on the filter expressions.

One looks like normandy.addons['uBlock0@raymondhill.net'].isActive and often times, several of these get strung together with ||.

The other I see is something like normandy.addons[\"@asdfjhsdfuhw\"] without the isActive part (also often strung together with ||s).

Also, the addon string looks different between these two things.

What is the difference between these two items?

[mythmon]

If you are seeing \ in filter expressions in something like Delivery Console or NDT, those are probably bugs in the recipes. On the API though that might just be normal string escaping.

normandy.addons is an object where the keys are add-on IDs (which can be anything including uBlock0@raymondhill.net, @asdfjhsdfuhw, or even just UUIDs), and the values are an object describing details about that add-on. Here's an example from my own profile:

normandy.addons["{446900e4-71c2-419f-a6a7-df9c091e268b}"]

{
  "id": "{446900e4-71c2-419f-a6a7-df9c091e268b}",
  "isActive": true,
  "name": "Bitwarden - Free Password Manager",
  "type": "extension",
  "version": "1.42.2",
  "installDate": "2020-02-21T00:16:14.000Z"
}

A filter like normandy.addons[\"@asdfjhsdfuhw\"] asks "is this add-on installed". A filter like normandy.addons['uBlock0@raymondhill.net'].isActive asks "is this add-on installed and enabled", which is a stricter check. Both are useful in some cases.

For example, if we want to test out a new password manager feature, we might exclude users that already have a well known password manager. In this case we want to know if it is enabled, because if it is disabled they aren't using it. In this case we'd use normandy.addons[...].isActive.

Another example would be trying to mitigate the damage that a malware add-on has done. In this case, we would want to test if the add-on is present, even if it was disabled (since it could have done the damage and then disabled itself). In this case we'd just use normandy.addons[...]. If the add-on is installed, that will evaluate to a truthy value, and if the add-on is not installed, that will evaluate to undefined.

[uhlissuh]

OK thanks for the clarification.