MSHTML Hosting Article Published
I wrote an MSHTML hosting article for the C++Builder Developer’s Journal. They decided to make the issue freely available. HTML and PDF versions are available.
MSHTML Hosting – Drawing On WebBrowser
Hosting the WebBrowser in your application makes it easy to create slick-looking textual UI’s. HTML is a fairly expressive markup language and the results can be very professional with little difficulty. The graphical side is a little less impressive. Thankfully, SVG and VML (native support in the WebBrowser control) go a long way to fill …
MSHTML Hosting – More Tricks
Here are a couple miscellaneous tips for using the WebBrowser while in design (edit) mode. Setting Focus In Design Mode With the WebBrowser control in design mode, there are times that focus (and the blinking cursor) are not set correctly. For example, with focus in the editor, ALT+TAB away from your application, and then back …
MSHTML Hosting – Editing Tricks
Show Table Borders This is a little feature like you find in MS Word. It will display table invisible borders in light gray color so you can see the structure of the table even if borders are turned off. The feature only works when the WebBrowser is in design mode. Since it’s an IOleCommandTarget editing …
MSHTML Hosting – More Editing
Previously I talked about exposing the HTML editor hiding inside the WebBrowser control. I also talked about IOleCommandTarget and how you can control formatting and layout features of the editor. It won’t take long before you discover that the IOleCommandTarget command ID’s are somewhat limited. At some point, you will need to insert specialized text …
MSHTML Hosting – User Content
I have been posting about using MSHTML to display HTML-based content in your Windows applications. Some of the reasons I started doing this in my own code include: Easy way to create a modern looking task-based UI. Flexible and extensible, with a built-in script engine (JavaScript) and style system (CSS). Based on open standards There …
MSHTML Hosting – Calling JavaScript From Host
I don’t know how often someone would want to call a JavaScript (JS) function in the WebBrowser control from the host application. Since the host can control many, if not more, aspects of the HTML content externally using IDocHostUIHandler or the MSHTML DOM interfaces, it seems unnecessary to implement a method in JS and call …
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MSHTML Hosting – Editing
Did you know that you can turn WebBrowser into a decent WYSIWYG HTML editor? It’s true and it’s relatively simple. There are actually two ways to turn on the editor mode: contentEditable markup attribute, and IHTMLDocument2::designMode method. Since we are talking about embedding WebBrowser in an application, the IHTMLDocument2::designMode method is the most typical choice. …
MSHTML Hosting – IDocHostUIHandler
We can’t discuss embedding WebBrowser in an application without also discussing IDocHostUIHandler. The IDocHostUIHandler (and IDocHostShowUI) interface is the standard method provided by Microsoft for customizing how WebBrowser works when hosted in an application. Some of the things you can use IDocHostUIHandler to do include: Disable standard right-click, context menu (or provide your own version) …
MSHTML Hosting – Odds & Ends
In this post I wanted to cover some miscellaneous things you may want to do with your embedded WebBrowser. On its own, the IWebBrowser2 interface does not support doing much more than we already covered in previous posts. However, if you start using the MSHTML DOM interfaces, much more functionality is available. Here is a …