[MondeoST24]

Hi,

Does anyone know how to instantiate/initialize an active x control in a windows forms app in code. In particular the ax web browser control.

It works fine just dropping it onto the form, but I want to create it from scratch in a seperate thread to the UI, I can create it and it appears on the form however when I call its navigate method I get this

Exception of type 'System.Windows.Forms.AxHost+InvalidActiveXStateException' was unhandled

Thanks

[gazmac]

What code did you try to dynamically create the web-browser?

[AtmaWeapon]

Originally Posted by MondeoST24

Does anyone know how to instantiate/initialize an active x control in a windows forms app in code. In particular the ax web browser control.

.NET 2.0 is free and has a .NET WebBrowser control; consider using this instead of the ActiveX control unless your requirements state you cannot use .NET 2.0.

It works fine just dropping it onto the form, but I want to create it from scratch in a seperate thread to the UI

This is probably going to give you fits. The threading model really only supports interaction with controls on the thread that created them; having controls created from another thread is going to introduce a nightmare of thread marshalling that will require several bad ideas to implement.

[MondeoST24]

Thanks,

Let me give you a bit more info. What I'm trying to achieve is an application which has seven web browsers each connecting to a pricing site. My application automatically goes through each site, logging in, choosing a vehicle, choosing parameters then finally scraping a price of the final page. In the end I want to return all the prices to the user cheapest first.

Is there a better way of going about it that someone can suggest?

Thank you

[AtmaWeapon]

Originally Posted by MondeoST24

Thanks,

Let me give you a bit more info. What I'm trying to achieve is an application which has seven web browsers each connecting to a pricing site. My application automatically goes through each site, logging in, choosing a vehicle, choosing parameters then finally scraping a price of the final page. In the end I want to return all the prices to the user cheapest first.

Is there a better way of going about it that someone can suggest?

Thank you

The WebBrowser control is asynchronous by nature so there'd be no need to muck about with threads, but this is a ham-fisted brute force approach to the method and I think there is a better way.

Why do you need the web browser if all you are interested in is the HTML? There are several open discussions about using HttpWebRequest to get the HTML of a page, then parsing that HTML for specific values on this site. I think this would be the best method, though the only catch is that I can't figure out how to get that HTML text into a class like HtmlDocument that provides nice DOM parsing methods.

*edit* Actually I've made a breakthrough though it's kind of messy. The following code demonstrates retrieving a page's HTML, creating an mshtml object from it, then using the mshtml object's properties to get values from the HTML. It requires a reference to the Microsoft.mshtml assembly:

Imports System.Net
Imports mshtml

Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        Dim requestUri As New Uri("http://www.xtremevbtalk.com")
        Dim request As WebRequest
        Dim response As WebResponse

        ' Make our request then get the response
        request = WebRequest.Create(requestUri)
        request.Method = "GET"
        response = request.GetResponse()

        ' Get the page's HTML from the response
        Dim responseStream As System.IO.Stream
        Dim reader As System.IO.StreamReader
        Dim theHtml As String

        responseStream = response.GetResponseStream()
        reader = New System.IO.StreamReader(responseStream)
        theHtml = reader.ReadToEnd()

        ' Now create the mshtml object and get its title
        Dim doc As IHTMLDocument2 = New HTMLDocument()
        doc.write(theHtml)
        Dim title As String = doc.title

        Console.WriteLine(title)

        Console.ReadLine()
    End Sub

End Module