Making a reporter

note

Anything that only works unsandboxed will be noted, but regardless, we will assume you are creating an unsandboxed extension during this tutorial.

Make a new block

Add a new object to the blocks array. This time, the blockType should be Scratch.BlockType.REPORTER.

Let's say this block will just use a simple testReporter() function:

[
  {
    opcode: 'logToConsole',
    text: 'log to console',
    blockType: Scratch.BlockType.COMMAND
  },
  {
    opcode: 'testReporter',
    text: 'testing!',
    blockType: Scratch.BlockType.REPORTER
  }
]

And let's just make the function return a basic string:

class Extension {
    // getInfo...

    logToConsole() {
      console.log('Hello world!');
    }

    testReporter() {
        return "Hello world!";
    }
}

Loading this into PenguinMod, you should see the following:

This works! But why is there a checkbox?

Reporter-specific parameters

disableMonitor

We can add the disableMonitor property to our block to remove the variable monitor option in the category.

{
  opcode: 'testReporter',
  text: 'testing!',
  blockType: Scratch.BlockType.REPORTER,
  disableMonitor: true
}

This isn't the only specific parameter we can add here:

allowDropAnywhere

This is used a lot less, but we can use this parameter to place the block into "unexpected areas":

{
  opcode: 'testReporter',
  text: 'testing!',
  blockType: Scratch.BlockType.REPORTER,
  allowDropAnywhere: true
}

Final code

first-reporter.js - View source

(function(Scratch) {
  'use strict';
  class Extension {
    getInfo() {
      return {
        id: "johnMyExtension",
        name: "My Extension",
        blocks: [
          {
            opcode: 'logToConsole',
            text: 'log to console',
            blockType: Scratch.BlockType.COMMAND
          },
          {
            opcode: 'testReporter',
            text: 'testing!',
            blockType: Scratch.BlockType.REPORTER,
            disableMonitor: true,
	    allowDropAnywhere: true
          }
        ]
      };
    }

    logToConsole() {
      console.log('Hello world!');
    }
    testReporter() {
      return "Hello world!";
    }
  }

  Scratch.extensions.register(new Extension());
})(Scratch);

Next steps

Why don't we create a real boolean next?