TLDR: Best way to close a renderer window from main (or the renderer itself).
I am splitting up a process between X invisible renderer windows. When a renderer finishes its work, I want it to send an event to the main process and then close. Right now I have
//invisibleRenderer.js
doStuff().then(() => {
ipcRenderer.invoke('finish');
}
What is the best way to close the window? Is it in the ipcMain.handle? I can't figure out which method to call with which id.
ipcMain.handle('finish', (event, args) => {
//do what? event.frameId, event.processId, event.sender.id...
})
You can use BrowserWindow.fromId(event.sender.id) to get a reference to the window from where the IPC call originated, as demonstrated in this question.
This works fine in the main process. The following example opens 5 windows and loads the same contents. Each renderer script invocation picks a random delay (to simulate some work) and then dispatches the finish message to the main process. There, the main process picks up the BrowserWindow reference using event.sender.id and closes the corresponding window.
app.js
const {app, BrowserWindow, ipcMain} = require("electron");
const windows = [];
app.on("ready", function() {
for (let i=0; i<5; i++) {
let win;
win = new BrowserWindow( {
width: 300,
height: 300,
x: i*100,
y: i*100,
webPreferences: {
nodeIntegration: true,
contextIsolation: false
},
});
win.loadURL(`file://${__dirname}/index.html`);
windows.push(win);
}
});
ipcMain.handle("finish", (event, args) => {
const win = BrowserWindow.fromId(event.sender.id);
win.close();
});
index.html
<html>
<body>
Renderer
</body>
<script type="text/javascript" src="renderer.js"></script>
</html>
renderer.js
const {ipcRenderer} = require("electron");
// Simulate some work by choosing a random delay..
const delay = Math.round(Math.random()*10000);
setTimeout(() => ipcRenderer.invoke("finish"), delay);