Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #36. Select Multiple Checkboxes

Toggle series of checkboxes at once in web forms with a Shift-click.

Web-based email is one of the great success stories when it comes to pure web-based applications. But most web mail sites are still more difficult to use than their desktop counterparts. One of the niceties that desktop programs offer is the ability to select multiple items in a list, by clicking the first item and then Shift-clicking another item, to select all the items in between. This hack brings this functionality to web-based applications, allowing you to click a checkbox (for example, to select a message in your web mail inbox) and then Shift-click another checkbox, to select all the checkboxes in between.

The Code

This user script was specifically tested on Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Google Personalized Home Page. By default, it will run on all pages except Gmail, where it is known to cause problems. If you find that it interferes with other sites you use, you should add them to the "Excluded pages" list in the Manage User Scripts dialog.

The basic functionality is fairly straightforward. I do want to draw attention to one specific function: NSResolver. This function is passed as a parameter to the document.evaluate function to execute an XPath query. Firefox's XPath engine uses the NSResolver function to evaluate namespace prefixes in the XPath expression. In XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 pages served with a "Contenttype: application/xhtml+xml" HTTP header, all the elements on the ...