Electron rendering process and WebView: How to achieve efficient 'synchronous' communication?

Efficient collaboration between Electron rendering processes and WebView: Simulating synchronous communication

In Electron application development, communication between the rendering process and the embedded WebView is a common requirement. Preload script injection is usually used to combine event listening and message sending mechanisms to achieve asynchronous communication. However, in some scenarios, such as when the rendering process and WebView need to work closely together to complete a specific task, the delay of asynchronous communication may be difficult to accept. The developer hopes to simulate a synchronous communication mechanism similar to ipcRenderer.invoke , using await to wait for the response of the WebView.

This article discusses how to achieve efficient "synchronous" communication between the Electron rendering process and the WebView. It should be emphasized that truly synchronous communication across processes or across thread environments is often difficult to achieve because this can block the main thread, causing interface lag or application unresponsiveness. But we can simulate synchronization effects through clever architectural design to meet the needs of efficient collaboration.

The solution provided in the article is not really synchronous, but uses Promise and async/await syntax sugar to simplify code, improve readability and maintainability, and avoid explicit callback functions.

This solution is based on Electron's IPC mechanism. The rendering process calls the preload script injected into the WebView through window.api.someFun() . The preload script uses ipcRenderer.invoke('someFun') to send a request to the main process. The main process processes the request and returns data through ipcMain.handle('someFun', () => { return '123'; }) . The rendering process's await window.api.someFun() waits for the main process to respond, thereby simulating the synchronization effect. It should be noted that this is still an asynchronous operation, async/await just simplifies the code and avoids callback hell. There is a delay during the main process processing requests and data return, but developers do not need to explicitly handle asynchronous processes.

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