URL views

[Bryan Donaldson]

In URL views, what, if any, context information is made available to the
page? Is there any way to determine which node in the scope pane has been
selected?

<sorry if this has been asked before - I cannot seem to find many mentions
of the URL view at all>
--
Bryan Donaldson
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it...

[MeanGene]

Hi Bryan,
Sorry, there is no context information that is sent to a URL view. The
problem being that you can't rely on every URL implemeting a common
interface that MMC could talk to. And of course none was developed by the
MMC team.
There are a few possible solutions though....
In MMC 2.0, you can use the object model so that DHTML can communicate with
the Snap-in and exercise some control over many UI events. For example, if
code in your DHTML page needs to have a particular scope item selected. To
do this you must implement veiw extensions which only work on MMC 2.0/XP.
Keep in mind that MMC 2.0 is not supported on downlevel platforms such as
Win9X and W2K.
The other way is to implement a private COM interface that your Snap-in
owns. It must of course be fully marshalled
You would have to find a way to pass the pointer on to the page when it's
created.

You might also run into issues with toolbars since they have no way to
communicate with either a URL or an OCX.

Gene
Microsoft Support

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[Bryan Donaldson]

Thanks for the response. Perhaps in a later release, they can encode some
information from the Scopeitem in the URL, like maybe the Name and the Key.
The DHTML then has a chance to find and display the information relevant to
the selected node. It just seems silly to have to fire up the object model
to find out something that was known by the process that invoked the page.
And, of course, the object model is ONLY a solution if the page is locally
hosted.

"MeanGene" <Mean...@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:dSw5ish...@cppssbbsa01.microsoft.com...

> Hi Bryan,
> Sorry, there is no context information that is sent to a URL view. The
> problem being that you can't rely on every URL implemeting a common
> interface that MMC could talk to. And of course none was developed by the
> MMC team.
> There are a few possible solutions though....

[snip]

[MeanGene]

One case where we found a pretty good solution to using a URL view was the
Xerox print manager.
In that case each scope node was the IP address of a network printer, When
a scope node was selected, they go out to the IP address and retireve it's
Configuration page to display in the result pane. Worked pretty good.
One of the guys here told me you can send parameters to an asp page. So
that might be worth trying if you knew ahead of time the URL pointed to and
asp page, and the asp page had code which knew what to do with the
parameter, but that's a long way for working for any arbitrary URL.