Hello All...
Now bear with me if I use incorrect terminology as I'm only just trying OLE and Web Browser embedding.
Goal:
In our ERP system, we have existing implementations of OLE embedded web pages. One example: shows a graph of a Driver's performance in the lower left of the form, surrounded by standard form controls. But I want to embed pages using the latest Web functionality. I was curious so I've been experimenting.
Our existing stack is complicated.
1. Smalltalk Form - with small Part that is a custom class extended from AbtOleControlView.
2. A method on the Form sets the URL for AbtOleControlView.
3. The URL points to a Tomcat Servlet.
4. Which in turn uses Jasper Reports to finally generate a basic HTML page with a single dynamically generated PNG image (base64 encoded directly)
All well and good and works as intended.
I wanted to see what else I could embed.... So I started small and merely wanted a locally hosted page running just some demos from new JS Charting libraries (like Highcharts, amCharts, etc). And hit issues.
*Long Story short*
* I have learnt that by Microsoft's default, it 'processes' the page as IE7 , specifically (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; Tablet PC 2.0; wbx 1.0.0; Zoom 3.6.0) - I made a page that just said the UserAgent.
* And I have learnt that you can change this in two ways
1) via the <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" ...> tag if you control the source server/page
2) via the Registry (...\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION) keys with your Application name set.
I got better results (word to the wise, the UA string will still report the old version.
However it all felt
unsatisfactory. For example, even setting to the latest embeddable (IE11), I still ran into issues using some graphs employing ES6+ JavaScript syntax.
QuestionWell I have many so I will list them out.
- The embedded page didnt seem to be interactable?
I found that 'onhover' and other features weren't working when embedded
- Anyone know of Chrome or Firefox OLE controls or anything >IE11?
- What are other people's experiences trying similar things?
It seems like a wonderful opportunity to marry the two platforms together and leverage these wonderful web visualisations in our Enterprise software systems.
Looking forward to people's insights.
Thanks all!
Regards, Matthew.