I need to display HTML in my silverlight application and cannot find a way of doing it. I cannot use the web browser control as it needs to be able to run in or out of a browser.
Does anyone know of a good way to do this, because all I can think of doing at the moment is running replace methods on the text to just replace the tags with C# equivalents eg(<br /> to \n).
The way I do it is to check if the application is running inside the browser and change the means of display accordingly. If running inside the browser, I overlay the application with an IFrame, as I describe in this article: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Building-a-Silverlight-Line-Of-Business-Application-Part-6.aspx. Otherwise, I use the WebBrowser control. I have a control which does this all for you in the source code that accompanies my book, which is downloadable from the Apress website here: http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4638.
Hope this helps...
Chris
I believe what you are looking for is HTML Bridge.
Edit I'm am actually now unsure if you'll still have access to javascript if you're running this OOB. I'm going to look into this some more and will further update. I'll still leave the answer up though for reference.
Second Edit Here is what I've found. HTML Bridge is disabled when you run silverlight out of browser. This disables access to the HTML DOM as well as Javascript. However, according to a comment on this site:
HTML Bridge is not available when you first install a OOB app. But you CAN force it if you modify the index.html in the folder where the app is installed just adding the enablehtmlaccess parameter.
It works!
You can even create dynamic HTML elements using the well-known methods of the HtmlPage class. You can even open a new browser window with the Navigate() method and its "_blank" parameter.
Keep in mind this information was posted about SL 3. Its possible that this may have changed, but I doubt it. So it seems that what you may want to do is build a script into the startup of your SL app that detects whether or not your app is running out of browser. If it is then you may want to have some script to call that can modify this file for you.
There recently was a similar question.
I posted a link there to an implementation that parses and displays HTML inline in Silverlight. Of course, it will work only with simple HTML, but maybe you can expand it to your needs.
Related
I'm trying to scrape a particular webpage which works as follows.
First the page loads, then it runs some sort of javascript to fetch the data it needs to populate the page. I'm interested in that data.
If I Get the page with HtmlAgilityPack - the script doesn't run so I get what it essentially a mostly-blank page.
Is there a way to force it to run a script, so I can get the data?
You are getting what the server is returning - the same as a web browser. A web browser, of course, then runs the scripts. Html Agility Pack is an HTML parser only - it has no way to interpret the javascript or bind it to its internal representation of the document. If you wanted to run the script you would need a web browser. The perfect answer to your problem would be a complete "headless" web browser. That is something that incorporates an HTML parser, a javascript interpreter, and a model that simulates the browser DOM, all working together. Basically, that's a web browser, except without the rendering part of it. At this time there isn't such a thing that works entirely within the .NET environment.
Your best bet is to use a WebBrowser control and actually load and run the page in Internet Explorer under programmatic control. This won't be fast or pretty, but it will do what you need to do.
Also see my answer to a similar question: Load a DOM and Execute javascript, server side, with .Net which discusses the available technology in .NET to do this. Most of the pieces exist right now but just aren't quite there yet or haven't been integrated in the right way, unfortunately.
You can use Awesomium for this, http://www.awesomium.com/. It works fairly well but has no support for x64 and is not thread safe. I'm using it to scan some web sites 24x7 and it's running fine for at least a couple of days in a row but then it usually crashes.
I'm trying to use an invisible WebBrowser control to print a very simple HTML document. Our application requires that we be able to print several documents this way, and that they all can be sent to different printers. Unfortunately, I haven't been very successful in making the output go to the right printer.
The way it works right now is that before printing a document, the application determines which printer is to receive it, and sets the default printer accordingly. To do this it uses SetDefaultPrinter() imported from WinSpool.drv. If I step the code in debug mode I can clearly see that the default printer changes (and this change is reflected in the control panel UI), but the WebBrowser still insists on using the original default printer.
The MSDN documentation, from what I've seen, doesn't really provide a solution for this scenario. I would greatly appreciate some input on how I can accomplish this programmatically.
Given what you've said, perhaps if you restart the process which contains the web browser control (or the process which is the web browser control), after you change the default printer? That's the kind of thing I see happening here, for example.
I suppose it would be possible to fork off a background process that does the actual printing, but I'm really hoping for a simpler solution.
Forking was my first thought towards a probably-simplest solution.
Some other alternatives are as follows.
1). IE, which the webbrowser control is wrapping, exposes APIs via ActiveX. One of its/those APIs might let you specify the destination printer.
2). Some executables (I don't know about IE) have printto entries in the registry. For example, Acrobat Reader has an entry whose value is as follows:
""C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe"" /t "%1" "%2" "%3" "%4"
That's used for specifying the syntax of the command-line which you can use to print and specify a (non-default) printer. You can also Google for printto, see e.g. PrintTo command in the ShellExecute.
3). I have implemented an HTML control for .NET of my own, which doesn't depend on IE. You say that your HTML (and CSS I presume) are simple, so perhaps I can render it, either out of the box or with only a little extra development effort. I don't support printing, but printing is quite easy for a user control to implement. Getting me to implement that for you would cost you several hundred but, who knows, maybe it's worth it to you. It would be quite a light-weight solution, and perhaps well supported. You could email me if you want to discuss that further.
4). You might also find other controls, similar to mine, more or less famous/expensive; or other applications, e.g. OpenOffice etc etc.
5). You could consider converting the HTML (somehow) to another format (e.g. PDF) for which you have an application which gives you better support for printing.
I've had the exact same problem, and incorporated this control instead of the standard .NET WebBrowser to work around it.
This works on .NET 3.5, if not before
this.webBrowser1.ShowPrintDialog();
I have an web based application. The content for the Home page has been currently mentioned in the HTML code for the Home page using , and tags. To change the content anytime in future, it needs to be changed in the HTML code. :(
Is there a way that we can pick up the content from some external place and get it reflected through the website. This ways, any change if required can be made at the external location without referring to the application's code.
Please advise if there is any solution for it.
Thanks.
You can
Use a database
Include external files using Server Side Includes
Read external files and write their contents and an alternative method
Sounds like you're looking for a Content Management System (CMS), which will allow your content editors access to modify only specific blocks of a page that you specify.
There are a ton out there to do what you want, so you don't have to start from scratch. Just Google 'CMS'.
Although I haven't used it myself, DotNetNuke is a popular one these days and has a free version.
OK, so we have an online downloads store accessed via our software. Recently we've had requests to allow downloads via normal browsers and it's fairly easy just to slap a download page on. The problem is that it would be confusing to people having two download links, one for the software and one for their web browser, so we want to differentiate between the two and only show the relevant download link.
From what I've gathered, the .net WebBrowser component is the same as IE and uses the same User Agent, so we can't use that unless we subclass the WebBrowser in the software to make it use a specific User Agent. It's the more sensible option, but we'd have to roll out another updated version, which is less than ideal.
Are there any other ways to tell if someone's accessing a site via the .net component? My only other alternative is to copy the store to a different address with the different download links and send people there. Again this is doable, but not ideal.
Check if window.external is null. IE implements window.external to have methods like AddSearchProvider where most of time WebBrowser.ObjectForScripting is null.
I'm not sure if there is any better way to do this, but here is one idea... The WebBrowser control has a property Document that gives you access to the DOM object representing the loaded document (after the page is loaded). This object has InvokeScript method that you can use to run some JavaScript in the loaded page.
You could write a simple JavaScript function, say hideWebDownload() that would switch the view to a view used when the application runs locally and invoke it from your WinForms application that hosts the WebBrowser control:
webCtrl.Document.InvokeScript("hideWebDownload");
The default view of the page would show the download link for web and calling this function in the local application would switch the view to local download link.
Have your software pass in an invisible (to the user) value in the querystring of the URL.
Trivial to look if that's present.
This is a bit special:
I'm loading some HTML in string form into the WebBrowser control via the DocumentText property.
Now when I print the page with a PDF printer (Bullzip PDF Printer in my case) it always takes the URL as document name which is "about:blank".
Is there any way to change this to another value by either changing the URL property (it's read-only) or by changing the print behaviour to use another text rather than the URL as filename?
There are a couple of options that I am aware of though my knowledge on this subject is a bit dated.
The first is to change the computer settings in Internet Options. Regardless of whether this is done by hand or through a registry change script, it is simple for the developer, but obviously not the best approach from the deployment or compatibility angles.
The next approach is to develop a custom print template. This is not fun, but is probably the most professional approach. As much as I would love to include all of the information needed on this approach in this post, it is too much to cover. Here is a good overview and good luck Googling from there.
My experience with this involved printing from the MS WebControl component used in a .NET 1.1 Winforms application to the Web Super Goo PDF converter component. Your mileage may vary.
You can change the header and footer such that the URL property is not printed.
Try to Navigate to a URL, then cancel that via DWebBrowserEvents::BeforeNavigate