IE8 automation: How to programatically open an URL - Tutorial (2)

Get started with web macros in IE

Every web macro has to start somewhere, has to start somehow. There are basically two scenarios of automating Internet Explorer browser:

• start a new IE browser and navigate to a URL to begin with
  


• connect to an existing instance of Internet Explorer browser and continue automation

In this short tutorial I'll show you how to open a new Internet Explorer browser and open an URL with Twebst Automation Studio. Let's start with a short JScript web macro.

var core    = new ActiveXObject('Twebst.Core');
var browser = core.StartBrowser('http://www.google.com/');

The code is quite self-explaining. It creates a Twebst object and then opens a given URL in a new IE browser instance. What you get back from StartBrowser call is a Browser object that can be used to further automate Internet Explorer.

What can you do with a browser object? Quite a lot of things: navigate to a URL, find HTML elements and frames inside it, close the browser, get information about the browser, automate modal and modeless HTML dialgos and wait to complete navigation and loading.

That's all for now, but these feature will be covered in next tutorials!

Get Twebst Automation Studio Free Edition

(Automation Library and Macro Recorder for Internet Explorer)

IE Web Login Automation

One highly repetitive web task is the logon to a web site. This is a common scenario where Twebst Web Automation Library really shines. Here is a short web macro written in JScript language that automatically logs you on Yahoo Mail site. All you have to do is to replace "UUUUUUUUUU" and "PPPPPPPPPP" with your user name and password in the code below.

// Open a browser and navigate to yahoo mail login page.
var core = new ActiveXObject("Twebst.Core");
var browser = core.StartBrowser("https://login.yahoo.com/config/mail?.intl=us");

// Find login fields.
var u = browser.FindElement("input text");
var p = browser.FindElement("input password");
var s = browser.FindElement("input submit");

// Log on to site by filling the user-name and password fileds and then click submit boutton.
u.InputText("UUUUUUUUUU");
p.InputText("PPPPPPPPPP");
s.Click();

FindElement searches thru all frames/iframes hierarchy for the first input element of type text/password/submit. Additional conditions can be specified for search (like searching an element by id/name or any other HTML attribute). Search conditions can make use of regular expressions if needed.

One more important thing is that FindElement method waits for the web page to be completely loaded before searching the element (the timeout can be specified by using core.loadTimeout property). Read more about Twebst Library...

Download:

• Twebst Library Pro (it must be installed for the macro to work).


• YahooMail.js


• Script Of The Day system if you want to easily install more login templates.

Homemade Handcrafted Help System

A good documentation is very important for any serious project. It comes a moment in life, when programmers find themselves working on the help system. That is what happened to me during the later stages of Twebst Web Automation Library project. Even though this project is not open source, I try to make public as many parts of it as possible. Today I will present Twebst Help System and how this tedious and annoying task of creating it, was automated.

Twebst is a library of COM objects used to automate Internet Explorer browser. The objects and the supported properties and methods have to be documented . The page structure is the same for every object/method/property and it also contains code samples that need syntax highlighting. This is good news because it leaves a lot of place for templates and automation.

Here is the solution:

• The template is an XML document. When documenting an object/method or property the focus is on the content rather than on formatting the text. There is one XML file for each object/method/property.
• A WSH script written in jscript parses the XML document and adds syntax highlighting to sample code in the documentation page. Regular expression are used for parsing.
  
• cross references are added automatically by the same script.
  
• then a XSL transformation is applied to convert XML source to a HTML document that will be eventually written to disk.
• The whole process is optimized by removing unnecessary operations like generating the HTML when it already exists and is newer than its XML source.
• Finally the HTML documents refers a CSS style sheet to easily change the look.
  

It goes like this:
XML + JScript-> XML with color syntax and cross references + XSL -> HTML + CSS -> CHM

For local help, the CHM compiler is invoked as a final step and a CHM Help File is generated. All you have to do is launching Build.js script you may find in the archive below.

Downloads: TwebstHelp.zip

Prerequisites: In order to build the CHM file you'll need HTML Help Workshop from Microsoft.

What's wrong with Internet Explorer Automation?

The Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, Power Point, Access, Outlook) allow their users to manipulate Office documents from Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code. It is possible to write a VBA macro in Excel that initializes a series of cells, and uses the cells to display a chart for instance.

Automation is the process of controlling one product from another product with the result that the client product can use the objects, methods, and properties of the server product. The client has access to the object model of the server.

Though Internet Explorer browser is not part of the Office suite, it supports automation. Here is a short sample:

// Create an IE automation object.
var ie = new ActiveXObject("InternetExplorer.Application");

// Make it visible and navigate to a given URL.
ie.Visible = true;
ie.Navigate("http://www.google.com/");

// Give it some time to load the page and then get the document.
WScript.Sleep(3000);
var doc = ie.Document;

// Fill out search field.
var edit = doc.getElementsByName("q").item(0);
edit.value = "codecentrix";

// ... and press the submit button.
var submit = doc.getElementsByName("btnG").item(0);
submit.click();

Here is ie_auto.js file for download.
However there are problems with Internet Explorer automation:

• it may not work at all on Windows Vista unless the script is running at the same integrity level as iexplore.exe process. Simply clicking the js file won't do it. The script will run at medium integrity level and Internet Explorer has low integrity level and as result the script fails. If you run the script at high integrity level the newly started IE instance will have the same high integrity level and the script works (but this is not the best option from a security point of view). Changing the integrity level of the running script (or application) is not always the most desirable or easiest thing to do.

• no support to "connect" to already existing IE documents.

• sub-documents in different domains are not accessible for scripting due to cross scripting security issues (see my older posts: "When IHTMLWindow2::get_document returns E_ACCESSDENIED" and "When IHTMLWindow2.document throws UnauthorizedAccessException").

• difficult search of elements across all sub-documents inside frames/iframes (and sometimes impossible, see the point above).

• difficult and time consuming search of HTML elements on attributes other than id or name (getElementById and getElementsByName are the only methods I know that search elements directly wihtout browsing element collections which might be very slow when performed out of process).

• no tab support (only launch a new tab).

• no direct support for synchronizing input actions (clicks, keys) with the HTML document loading (it could be implemented by registering to IE events like document complete or looping while the browser becomes ready to accept inputs).

• no advanced search criteria like regular expression or searching on multiple attributes.

If you are interested in solving the issues above, let me introduce a project I've been working on for some time now. Here's Twebst, web automation library for Internet Explorer!

Get it FREE!

(to be continued)

Creating shortcuts to Quick Launch Toolbar with WSH

I had this problem of creating shortcuts to Quick Launch Tollbar while working on Script Of The Day application. This small product is almost entirely created using JScript and Windows Scripting Host (WSH).

SpecialFolders method of WScript.Shell object provides the full path for some special folders like Desktop and Favorites but the directory for Quick Launch Toolbar is not supported. To get it I used %userprofile% env var like this:

var shell          = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
var quickLaunchDir = shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%userprofile%") +
                     "\\Application Data\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Quick Launch";
var oShellLink     = shell.CreateShortcut(quickLaunchDir + "\\Codecentrix.lnk");

oShellLink.TargetPath   = "http://www.codecentrix.com/";
oShellLink.IconLocation = "http://www.codecentrix.com/favicon.ico";
oShellLink.WindowStyle  = 1;
oShellLink.Description  = "Web Site";
oShellLink.Save();

Downloads:

• QuickLaunch.js sample file
  
• Script Of The Day application (FREE)

codeproject

focus vs fireEvent("onfocus")

While working on Twebst web automation library I encountered this problem: how to simulate setting the focus on HTML edit controls in Internet Explorer? There are two ways to do this.

1. Call IHTMLElement2::focus() method on target element that "causes the element to receive the focus and executes the code specified by the onfocus event".
2. Rise onfocus event on target element by calling IHTMLElement3::fireEvent() method.

The two approaches are quite similar but there are some interesting differences.

1. fireEvent("onfocus") does not actually set the focus on the element, it just executes the code of the onfocus handler event.
2. Calling focus method sets the focus on target element and call the onfocus event handler but not immediately. The onfocus event seems to be inserted in a queue and its handler is executed asynchronously after the current handler is finished.
3. If focus method is called from inside the onfocus handler nothing happens if the control already has the focus (that prevents an infinite recursion).

Example:


<html>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
function BtnFocusClick()
{
     document.getElementById('editTest').focus();
     window.status += "b";
}

function BtnOnFocusClick()
{
     document.getElementById('editTest').fireEvent('onfocus');
     window.status += "c";
}

function EditOnFocus()
{
     window.status += "a";
}
</script>

<body>
     <input type="text" onfocus="EditOnFocus()"; id="editTest"/><br/>
     <input type="button" value="focus" id="btnFocus" onclick="BtnFocusClick();"/>
     <input type="button" value="fire onfocus" id="btnOnFocus" onclick="BtnOnFocusClick();"/>
</body>
</html>

If pressing the button "fire onfocus" button the message in the Internet Explorer status bar is the expected one "ac". If pressing the "focus" button, the message is in reverse order than expected: "ba". That suggests that EditOnFocus handler is called after BtnFocusClick exit.

codeproject

Open TextRange selection as URL

On many forums, people post URLs as plain text and this forces me to:

• select the text URL
• ctrl+C to copy it in the clipboard
• ctrl+T to open a new tab
• paste the URL in the address bar of the newly created tab
• press "Enter" key to start navigation

I found this whole process very annoying and it seems I have to go through this many times a day. Here's my attempt to automate it by creating an extension for "Internet Explorer" similar to Linkification extension (for "Fire Fox" browser). I called my extension: "Make Link".

How it works:

• right click on text URL
• choose "MakeLink: use clicked text as link" menu item (the URL is open in a new tab automatically)

or you can

• fully select the URL text or only a part of it
• right click on selected text
• choose "MakeLink: use clicked text as link" menu item (text link is open in a new tab automatically)

DOWNLOADS:

• MSI setup file
• EXE setup file
• extension source code

Points of interests:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt registry key to add a item in the IE context menu
• gain access to window object passed in external.menuArguments
• document.selection property to get the selected TextRange
• TextRange methods: moveStart, moveEnd, moveToPoint, select
• The extension is entirely written in JScript (no BHO, no COM).

Known issues:

• on some web pages with horizontal scroll simply right click a text URL won't work. You need to select a part of the URL and then right click it.

COM number speller

Some time ago, I was asked to provide a way to print numbers as text in Romanian language. Interestingly, I couldn't find an easy way to do this in Excel (Office 2003 as far as I remember). Searching the internet, I found other people having the same problem. Microsoft provides a solution for English language, but not for Romanian.

I decided to create a reusable piece of code that will be easily used in as many environments as possible. I chose COM and ATL to be the solution to my problem. This is also a good programming exercise for my rusty COM / C++ skills and I plan to use it as a template for all my future COM objects.

Points of interest:

• error info support by implementing IErrorInfo interface.
• Help in CHM format and context identifiers specified in MIDL source file.
• BSTR manipulation using CComBSTR class provided by ATL.
• IDispatch support, so the component can be used from scripting environments.
  
• Spelling implementation itself and support for multiple languages (only Romanian and English for now).

To install the COM object just simply run Install.bat
Here is the Excel macro that makes use of NumberSpeller COM object:

Function Spell(n As Currency) As String
'Create the speller object.
Dim s As NumberSpellerLib.speller
Set s = New NumberSpellerLib.speller

Dim o As Object
Set o = s
o.Language = "ro"
Spell = o.Translate(n)
End Function

Downloads:

• full source code, compiled DLL and CHM help: NumberSpeller.zip
  
• C++ sample code: NumberSpellerSample1.zip
  
• Excel sample file: NumberSpellerSample2.zip
  
• JS sample file: NumberSpellerSample3.zip

Blogs and C++ syntax highlighting

This wasn't supposed to be my first post. I wanted to start my blogging existence writing about something else. It proved that being a blogger is not as easy as it should be, especially when trying to post some C++ code. The online editor allows to directly modify the HTML code but this is not the simplest or most enjoyable thing to do. Because I wanted C++ syntax highlighting so hard I decided to create a little tool to automate this task as much as possible and to allow me to focus on the real subject.

The result is cpptohtml.exe that takes a .cpp file as a command line argument and generates a .html file. If no file name is provided as argument, a standard "file open" dialog allows the user to specify the source .cpp file. The tool also accepts /C as command line arguments. When used the source code is taken from clipboard and the HTML result is put also in clipboard.

I found creating a windows shortcut to cpptohtml.exe very useful. This way I can launch the tool by pressing a shortcut key combination (CTR+ALT+T).
I'm gonna use this tool like this:

• open preferred IDE and copy the C++ source code into the clipboard.
  
• launch the tool using the shortcut key combination. The HTML result is in the clipboard.
• paste the formated HTML in the online blog editor.

Download:
You can find here the full source code and the executable. I used Visual C++ and LEX. The archive also contains a .js script to automate the shortcut creation. I am pretty happy with the final result and how C++, LEX and JScript combines to automate a boring repetitive task.

Beautiful the technology is!