The Firefox extension DictionarySearch is intended to allow you to highlight a word, right-click on it, and select “Dictionary Search for [highlighted word]”, looking up that word in an online dictionary. It is, however, very customizable. You can configure, as I have, the DictionarySearch add-on to point to any site you want it to. I have mine configured in both Firefox and Thunderbird to go to our inventory database. The database will open in a new Firefox tab and load the information for the inventory number I highlighted.
If you do a similar process frequently and have a URL that uses that information to be submitted (www.domain.com/inventory.pl?InvNumber=L73455, where L73455 is the inventory number you would be looking up), customizing DictionarySearch for your uses might come in very handy.
To add to Firefox, go to the extension listing and simply click on the “Add to Firefox” link. The extension installer dialog should pop-up.
To add to Thunderbird, right-click on the “Add to Firefox” link and click on “Save Link As…” Save the extension to your desktop or somewhere you can remember. Then in Thunderbird, go to Tools, Addons… Click the ‘Install…’ button and browse to the .xpi file you just downloaded and click ‘Open…’
You’ll need to restart Firefox/Thunderbird for the extension to complete its installation. Now we get to the customizing part:
In Firefox/Thunderbird go to Tools, Add-ons…
Find DictionarySearch in the list of Add-ons and click on it once to highlight it.
Click the Options… button under DictionarySearch.
Under Dictionary 1, change the ‘Text:’ field to something descriptive: Inventory Lookup $
Change the URL to your website: http://www.domain.com/inventory.pl?InvNumber=$
(The $ is a variable for whatever you have highlighted.)
Hit the ‘Ok’ button.
To use, just highlight an inventory number or hostname and right-click, then select ‘Inventory Lookup [highlighted text]’, or whatever you changed the ‘Text:’ field to.