Electron: How to listen to events on the ipcRenderer?

[stuartcusack]

I’ve managed to send events out from electron using:

mainWindow.webContents.send("event-name", value);

And I can successfully receive the event like so:

this.$q.electron.ipcRenderer.on('event-name', {
  // whatever
});

But how do I do this in reverse? i.e. send from the vue component to electron. This doesn’t seem to work:

this.$q.electron.ipcRenderer.send('event-name', {
	value: value
});

mainWindow.webContents.on('event-name', (event, info) => {
    console.log('event received')
});

[rick.luan]

This work for me

import { app, BrowserWindow, ipcMain } from ‘electron’
ipcMain.on(‘event-name’, (event, value) => {
mainWindow.webContents.send(‘event-name’, value)
})

[stuartcusack]

@rick-luan THANK YOU!

That works perfectly. You saved some hairs on my head.

[stuartcusack]

By the way, this might be useful for you if you ever need to pass multiple values from ipcRenderer to ipcMain.

/* in component (pass as many args as you like) */
ipcRenderer.send('savePassword', 'MyService', username, password);

/* in electron-main.js (define the args you want using JS rest operator and deconstruction) */
ipcMain.on('savePassword', (event, ...[service, account, secret]) => {
        // keytar is a nice package for secure storage of credentials on Electron
	keytar.setPassword(service, account, secret);
})

[stuartcusack]

And here’s a way to receive a response / get a variable from ipcRenderer:

/* in component - use sendSync when a response is needed */
let password ipcRenderer.sendSync('getPassword', 'MyService', username);

/* in electron-main.js */
ipcMain.on('getPassword', (event, ...[service, account]) => {
	var passwordPromise = keytar.getPassword(service, account);

	// Every function in keytar is asynchronous and returns a promise
	passwordPromise.then((result) => {
                // This is how we return data to ipcRenderer
		event.returnValue = result
	})
})

[stuartcusack]

@rick-luan I wonder if you can help me with this:
https://forum.quasar-framework.org/topic/3915/ipcrenderer-and-platform-detection-in-boot-files