2

The Chrome.history API gives this method:

deleteRange

chrome.history.deleteRange(object range, function callback)

Removes all items within the specified date range from the history. Pages will not be removed from the history unless all visits fall within the range.

(from https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/history#method-deleteRange)

My question is: How do you define the range?

I've tried using Javascript date() objects but they don't seem to work. Using simple integers doesn't work.

Edit

So it turns out that the epoch event is actually the 1st of January, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC

To get the right amount of miliseconds since then I used 

var oldDate = Date.now();

for the first startDate property and 

var newDate = Date.now();

for the endDate property.

In my case the coded turned out to be: 

chrome.history.deleteRange( {startTime: oldDate , endTime: newDate } , function(){ 
    console.log("Dates Removed");
});

Lots of thanks to bzlm for helping with this.

Brannie19
  • 87
  • 7
  • When you used simple integers, what did those integers represent? – bzlm Jun 18 '14 at 20:59
  • I thought the epoch was the opening of the Chrome window, so I used 0 and the amount of mills a button was pressed after that. Of course, now I know that I was doing the wrong thing. – Brannie19 Jun 18 '14 at 21:22
  • 1
    A more idiomatic way to get the current UNIX timestamp is `Date.now()` as opposed to `new Date().valueOf()`. – Xan Jun 18 '14 at 21:39
  • According to the other posts on StackOverflow, it is also faster because it's not creating a new object every time you call it. I've editted my post to your suggestion. – Brannie19 Jun 19 '14 at 10:03

1 Answers1

0

According to the documentation you linked to, the range is an object with two properties, startTime and endTime, that are dates

represented in milliseconds since the epoch.

So, for example,

chrome.history.deleteRange({ startTime: 1303125199, endTime: 1403125199 }, ...)

should work. JavaScript has built-in functionality to convert date objects to epochs.

bzlm
  • 9,626
  • 6
  • 65
  • 92
  • This does seem to do the trick. How do you get these integers though? How do you know that startTime and what does it represent? Same goes for the endTime. – Brannie19 Jun 18 '14 at 21:05
  • 1
    You can [convert](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9575790/how-to-get-current-epoch-unix-time-in-js) from normal date objects to "milliseconds since the epoch", which is what these integers mean. 1403125199 means 1403125199 seconds (ie. 16240 days) since [1970](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1090869/why-is-1-1-1970-the-epoch-time). The word "epoch" means "reference time". Epoch times are an easy way to represent dates and times as easily parsable numbers. – bzlm Jun 18 '14 at 21:07
  • Aha! So that's the bit I wasn't getting. Because I'm pretty new coding, I though the epoch was the starting of Chrome! Thank you very very very much! – Brannie19 Jun 18 '14 at 21:12