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replacement visual basic applications that use Microsoft IE as control
Years ago (~15) I wrote some VB applications that import IE as a component. While visiting some selected web pages, these applications would extract pertinent information and save them in a local (client side) database. Over the years IE has changed, OSes have changed and these applications are barley usable anymore. I am not interested in spending hundreds of dollars on new development environment with MS only to find that this can't even be done anymore.
It has been almost as long since I even looked at HTML. My question to the community is: to write replacements for these apps, would it be best to write them as extensions to the browser ( is it even possible) or would I have to run a local web server and create web pages that interact with the local sever to get the job done. My preference would be to have these as standalone applications without a need for a local web server but if push comes to shove... Also these applications have to be interactive as some human interaction is inevitable. Any tips, opinions and pointers are welcome.
All Replies (2)
Hi Bob, what's your budget?
In order to write to disk, I think you will need either a browser add-on such as a Firefox extension, or a stand-alone application.
You still can still manipulate Internet Explorer using the components of IE. (Example: I recently updated a VBA application in Word which grabs a webpage, parses it without displaying it in a window, then lays out the data in a document.) For full capability, though, you may need to learn VB.net or C#.
Depending on the pages, a Firefox extension could be fairly lightweight, but you would likely would need to rewrite your code in JavaScript, as Firefox doesn't speak VB.
Mozilla allows embedding of Gecko, the rendering engine in Firefox, into third party applications as described here: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Ge.../Embedding_Mozilla. However, unless there's a lot of time to learn this, you probably would be better off with one of the other options.
Finally, I'm sure there are pre-built scraping tools you can configure to extract anything you want from any site. That would be simplest, but I couldn't being to guess at the cost.
Anyway, I should note that this is not a developer-oriented website, so you probably should seek comments elsewhere as well.
Thanks for the reply. After posting I realized this is not the forum for my question. I hadn't thought of using an Office Application's VB. I will try porting it to MS Access.