José Roca's WebBrowser wrapper functions

[Bob Scott]

José,

This is fantastic. A browser that compiles to 74K in PB or 25K if compressed with Petite.

The only thing I had to do to get the program to compile in PBWin 7.04 was to remove the BYVAL in the pszCmdLine AS ASCIIZ PTR in the following:

FUNCTION Project1_InitApplication _
  ( _
  BYVAL hInstance   AS DWORD, _       ' handle of current instance
  [b][i]BYVAL[/i][/b] pszCmdLine  AS ASCIIZ PTR _   ' address of command line
  ) AS LONG
 ' Initializes ATL
   AtlAxWinInit
END FUNCTION

Of course, I changed the default URL to http://www.powerbasic.com/support/forums/Ultimate.cgi. I think I will try to add a dropdown to the URL to give a small amount of URL history. However, I really like this!

Thanks very much for sharing!

~Bob







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[This message has been edited by Bob Scott (edited March 30, 2005).]

[Borje Hagsten]

Agree, extremely cool and very generous of you to share all this work - thanks a lot, José!
I seldom become impressed of anything these days, but this is truly impressive..


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PowerBASIC Staff
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Private web-site: http://www.tolkenxp.com/pb
Free downloads: POFFS, incLean, PBcodec, custom controls and PB samples.

[José Roca]

Thanks for your kind words. However, my plans are more ambitious than
making a minibrowser. I want to make wrapper functions for the IHTMLDocument
interface and a module to sink to the events fired by the HTML page
(onclick, onkeypress, etc.). This will allow to create web pages on the
fly that will be shown in the instance of the webbrowser embedded in your
dialog and interact with the page via the events. It can be used for
help windows, html forms, html tables, html reports (with find, print
and printpreview), splash screens, html buttons and tooltips, html message
boxes with hyperlinks, show images and videos... All that a browser is
able to do, but working interactively with your application.

A tip to create a tabbed browser like FireFox is to make a MDI application
and in the NewWindow event create a MDI child window and a new instance of
the webbrowser, and call the IWebBrowser2_SetRegisterAsBrowserwrapper function.
The web page will be loaded in this new window instead of creating a new
Internet Explorer window.
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[This message has been edited by José Roca (edited March 30, 2005).]

[Tonny Bjorn]

webbrowser embedded in your dialog and interact with the page via the events

WOW! José - So you will be able to make a "web-based GUI" for an application. That is sweet music!

Regards
Tonny


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[Heber Jorge da Silva]

José,

Terrific!
Thanks for sharing with us.

Regards,


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[José Roca]

WOW! José - So you will be able to make a "web-based GUI" for an application. That is sweet music!

I have to do further research, but apparently it is possible. However,
the programmer will need to have good knowledge of COM and HTML.

Lets see:

The GetDocument function will retrieve the dispatch pointer of the web
page loaded in the browser. We will use this pointer to connect to the
events fired by the page. If, for example, the user presses a key, the
keypress event will be fired allowing us, among other things, to retrieve
the keycode and a pointer to the IHTMLElement interface.

At any time, the activeElement property of the IHTMLDocument2 interface
can be used to retrieve a pointer to the IHTElement interface of the
element that has the focus (sort of GetFocus function).

There are interfaces and events for everything (MSHMTL is a huge component).
This can lead to a different way of programming. You will design your GUI
as a web page and work with events instead of notification messages,
and COM instead of the Windows API.


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[This message has been edited by José Roca (edited March 30, 2005).]

[Bryan Flick]

Jose,

Very cool code! Thanks for sharing!

Thanks,
Flick


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[Brad D Byrne]

Hey Jose,

this stuff looks GREAT!!!

a one quick (dumb) question... I have a new machine.. that in which, I
have deleted IEexplorer, Outlook and any AOL related stuff.. now I have
had zero problems ...

so.. curious.. as I havn't learned this ATL/Com etc stuff yet... can these
wrappers also work using different browsers?, ie. firefox, opera ?

Thanks!! Brad

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Washington DC Area
Borje's "Poff's" is likely the BEST tool for learning PB.. http://www.tolkenxp.com/pb
And a few PBTool's & Beginner Help:http://sweetheartgames.com/PBTools/JumpStart.html

[This message has been edited by Brad D Byrne (edited March 31, 2005).]

[Patrice Terrier]

Brad,

This is an IE specific interface, the same I am using in ZAP (which is based on JazzAge but without ATL).
As José stated you must have a good knowledge of both COM and HTML.

Good work José,
and very generous to share this code with the community,

Note: For those of you who have downloaded the WinLIFT demo,
you can see a complete HTML help file using this technology (embedded web browser).



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Patrice Terrier
mailto[email protected][email protected]</A>
www.zapsolution.com
Addons: WinLIFT (Skin Engine), GDI+ helper (Graphic package), dvBTree (Index manager)

[Steve Smith]

Jose, you've done great work with COM programming. Have you any lunk with COM servers? I was looking around on the internet and I found some asm exmaples of com servers with event sinks. I didn't know if that meant it could be done in PB as well. If your interested, I can dig up the link for you.

Steve

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[José Roca]

can these wrappers also work using different browsers?, ie. firefox, opera ?

It can be used with Mozilla and the Mozilla ActiveX control: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm

However, it will not offer any advantage. The Microsoft WebBrowser is much more
advantageous for non English speaking users since context menus and dialogs are
localized.

Have you any lunk with COM servers?

This is a field where the cooperation of the compiler is needed. To code it
using low level COM techniques is difficult and nobody will do it. Philippe
has been offering since some years ago a free tool to do COM servers with PB,
JAOE17.

For those of you who have downloaded the WinLIFT demo, you can see a complete
HTML help file using this technology (embedded web browser).
...which is based on JazzAge but without ATL

Yes, JACOM can be used to do it, but ATL has the advantage that that the
window used to host the OCX can be moved, resized, etc., using the Windows
API instead of JACOM specific functions. Anyway, JACOM is now free, so
anybody can post examples that use this tool. Philippe promissed more than
a month ago to make the source code available. Still waiting...

As I have said, my plans are not to make a browser, but to use the great
hosting capabilities of this control for different purposes. For example,
you can make an HTML message box creating a popup dialog that will host
the control and show an HTML page that you can create on the fly in memory
(no need to save it to the disk). This can include, for example, an
hyperlink to your web page where the user can find further information.
You can also make a report using html and show it in a window of your
dialog, with the ability of print and print preview. Much more...


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[This message has been edited by José Roca (edited March 31, 2005).]

[Edwin Knoppert]

Jose, the mozilla control doesn't appear in my com browser.
After reading it seems to need the mozilla browser to be installed also.

Am i wrong?
I have not installed Mozilla browser.

Thanks,

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http://www.hellobasic.com
PwrDev - Visual Designer for pb/dll, pb/win, pb/cc
PwrStat - Static library linker for pb/dll or pb/win.

[José Roca]

The Mozilla control provides the wrapper code that converts between the
IWebBrowser and the internal Gecko engine interfaces and catches Gecko
events and fires the appropriate ActiveX events.

So you need to install both the Mozilla Browser and the WebBrowser wrapper.

Besides some minor differences, like having to add the WS_HSCROLL and
WS_VSCROLL styles to the window (otherwise you won't be able to scroll
the window), and of course the ProgID, this wrapper doesn't provide a
full implementation of the DOM model.

All this is explained in the link that I have provided:

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm


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[This message has been edited by José Roca (edited March 31, 2005).]

[Keith Waters]

…you can make an HTML message box…

The QHTM control, http://www.gipsysoft.com/ , provides an html message box and doesn’t require IE.

Keith


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[Keith Waters]

Oh – that’s odd. I’ve just noticed that apostrophise and ellipsis’s (three full stops) are coming out as question marks. Click on the "edit post" icon to see what I mean.

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[José Roca]

The QHTM control, http://www.gipsysoft.com/ , provides an html message box and doesn’t require IE.

Yes, but it does require a DLL, you have to pay $65 each time
("You get to use QHTM in one product and for one developer only"),
and you don't learn anything. Someone has to learn how to do things
if you want to have tools. Besides, the WebBrowser lets you to do
more things than QHTM.


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[Edwin Knoppert]

That's new to me..
QHTM was free except for some pro version afaik.



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http://www.hellobasic.com
PwrDev - Visual Designer for pb/dll, pb/win, pb/cc
PwrStat - Static library linker for pb/dll or pb/win.

[José Roca]

It is free for non-commercial use.


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[José Roca]

i have posted code to allow interactivity with a web page loaded in
an instance of the webbrowser control embedded in a pbwin application.

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...ad.php?t=24546


hope that someone with better knowledge of html than me will post a
better example showing the possibilities.


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[José Roca]

in the "webbrowser wrapper functions" thread (source code forum), i have
posted a technique to save the web page without prompting.
http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...ad.php?t=24548


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