Im creating a freeware application (long live the free community) and I'm trying to add various features that might drive people to use the application such as implementing whatsapp web https://web.whatsapp.com/ into the app so that the user will always have an "always on top" window with their chats rather than everytime having to switch tabs if they're multitasking on their browser.
The problem i am having is that the built in Browser control with VS 2013 does not work with whatsapp web and i get the option to use supported browsers like firefox...chrome...safari.
Is there anyway to make a VB.NET application open an actual chrome/firefox based browser within itself?
I found an article on Gecko Browser...I am not sure if web.whatsapp.com would see this as a firefox browser: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?692005-Mozilla-Firefox-Gecko-Xulrunner-in-VB-NET-%28versions-14-and-up%29
Help appreciated.
Related
I am working on an automation project, in which I need to capture the activities [ application launched, data entered, input type etc.] user performs on a desktop. I came across Microsoft UI Automation framework which so far works well for native windows based applications like MS Office, .NET apps etc. However I did not find any useful information / samples of capturing the information from different web browsers [Chrome is a must], Python apps, Java Apps etc. Can someone please confirm whether MS UI Automation Framework supports such apps. Any working example to extract user activities from these apps would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Chrome only supports UI Automation for toolbars, tabs, menu, buttons around the web page. Everything that's rendered as a web page is not seen by UIA.
For the web page content, the easiest way is to use Selenium (driven by the ChromeDriver), which is kind of a de facto standard for browsers, and has nothing to do with UIA.
To test if an app supports UIA, and how far it does, it's very easy, just run UIA's Inspect tool and check the UI tree over that application.
Some additions to Simon's answer...
Chrome page content can be seen by UIA if you run chrome --force-renderer-accessibility. Only for existing Chrome process it won't work. Though user can create a new tab chrome://accessibility manually and enable UIA for all or some chosen pages. This method also works for AT-SPI accessibility technology on Linux. Of course, Selenium WebDriver is an industry standard here. But another way exists. Both Mozilla and IE support UIA by default.
Inspect.exe can be simply downloaded from this GitHub repo.
Regarding Java apps it depends on the app type. Your chances is about 50/50.
WxPython or PyQt5 are good for UIA. TkInter or Kivy apps are not.
P.S. There is an example how to drag a file from explorer.exe and drop to Google Drive in Chrome using Python library pywinauto.
I'm a bit late to the party..
But Chromes accessibility features are only activated once something tries to access it's accessibility.
If you call AccessibleObjectFromWindow ([DllImport("oleacc.dll")]) with the window handle an existing chrome window will have its accessibility activated (and you'll see the actual web page content in UIA!).
If the chrome window is opened after your app is running - Chrome pings open processes for any open accessibility apps... for that you use AccessibleObjectFromEvent and the event you're responding to comes from the windows pipeline: EVENT_SYSTEM_ALERT = 0x0002 .
The bottom line is - you have to tell chrome that there's something installed that wants to access it's web page content.
Oh! and your application has to be signed!! Unsigned apps won't be able to access web content - I think that's the same in firefox too.
I hope this helps someone in the future.
See:
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/accessibility
I am using Blueprism to launch a URL in browser to spy it. I am able to launch the URL using the application modeller, but not able to spy it. The "Identify" option itself does not appear in blue prism. What is the problem and what is the solution ?
In spying a web application, key things to note for your application modeler;
1. your application modeler must be a "Browser-Based Application"
2. Launching from an executable or attaching to one. (Assuming you are launching from an executable from your question)
3. Specify url.
From your question. you are able to launch the browser from the application modeler. the most possible problem is you missing step 1 as mentioned above. Confirm your application modeler is specified as "Browser-Based Application"
Check a few things : is your modeler attached to the browser, are you in the right mode (for ease of use I would recommend using IE in HTML mode), and if that doesn't work try accessibility mode.
Try these simple steps:
Close the browser application and let the Blue Prism open your browser.
Try testing your object in Object Studio.
Now open your application modeler and launch. Check and you will find the identify option appeared.
If you launch application from Google Chrome, then you can get this error because in Google Chrome it's not possible to Spy and launch the applications. Any RPA Tools will support only Internet Explorer
I am designing the 8th update to my tabbed vb web browser (found at swordfish.savershot.net)in VB Express 08 and I'm having trouble with something. Whenever a webpage wants to open a link in a new tab (aka: Google Drive New Document), Internet Explorer turns on and runs the tab through them. I understand how it happens, because VB.NET by default uses IE as their Web Browsing core. However, I do not like it and I would love to be able to set those links to either open in a new tab in my browser or a new window in my browser. I have found a way to cancel the operation altogether but that's not very user friendly and I'd love to get my browser to a level where I can actually use it comfortably without annoying issues occurring. Thanks for the help.
I need to create a way so that when users load our webpage inside IEmetro it switches them to IE10 Desktop automatically. Reason behind this is our website features won't work in IEmetro. our site is built in Aspx and cs code, java script and uses some jquery at times.
Does anyone have an idea how we can achieve this?
You don't have any control over what browser the user is using; and there is no reason why your site should not work in Internet Explorer in the Modern UI (formerly 'Metro'). The two browsers are nearly identical in just about every way.
If you're having problems working with Internet Explorer 10, please ask a more specific question here and/or work through the Internet Explorer 10 Guide for Developers.
I would also be interested in this.
IEMetro unfortunately has a number of features disabled, and shows javascript alerts differently drastically altering the user experience.
I am writing a desktop app in VB.Net, and I'd like to include a web browser control to automate certain functions the user might have to perform in the browser. I have to render the page so I do not want to use the webrequest to make direct calls. When I publish the app, do I have to be concerned with which version of Internet Explorer the user has on their machine? Are their any third party, freely available, stable web browser controls available for VB.Net that people are using?
You could always ignore the whole IE issue and use the Mozilla engine embedded in your app:
geckofx
"An open-source component for
embedding Mozilla Gecko (Firefox) in
.NET applications."
http://code.google.com/p/geckofx/
Several versions of Visual Studio support web browser controls. Here is an article on how to implement one.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.webbrowser.aspx
The web browser control will work with different versions of Internet Explorer, but will be limited to the functionality supported by that version of Internet Explorer.
The article is based on Visual Studio 2008, but in the right corner of the article there are links, on how to use the web browser control, to earlier versions of Visual Studio.
If you embed the Webbrowser control in your application, what you're really doing is embedding a COM object. At runtime, your app will CoCreateInstance() the Webbrowser control, which will load it out of the version of SHDOCVW.DLL or IEFRAME.DLL that is currently on the machine. So, in plain English, you'll be getting the IE6, IE7 or IE8 Webbrowser control, depending on what is installed on the machine.
The practical differences, however, are minimal since the interfaces were published a long time ago and haven't changed over those versions. Differences in terms of different commands that some interfaces (such as IOleCommandTarget) support are abstracted away by the managed layer anyway, so you don't have to worry about that. The biggest difference will be rendering differences, since there is a huge delta in CSS conformance between IE6 and IE8. You'll have to test the various versions using Microsoft's app compat VHDs.
When I worked on the IE team application compatability wrt the Webbrowser control was a huge deal; the team works very hard to make sure that behavior doesn't regress for precisely this scenario—the custom enterprise VB app hosting the WebOC.
Though if you decide to go with an open-source solution to distribute with your app, may I suggest WebKit? Its layout engine is very good and the source code is pretty well maintained and easy to read, though you'll have to write your own managed hosting layer. The Gecko code is much harder to read and debug.