Fancy creating your own mini Web browser? How about knocking together a more personalised version of Internet Explorer?
In this mini guide, we’ll be finding out how you can use the special WebBrowser control that ships with Visual Basic 5 and 6 to instantly add surfing capabilities to your application.
Read it, print it, use it!
Before you can surf the Web within your application, you need to add the Web Browser control to your project. To do this:
- Start or open your Project
- Click ‘Project’, ‘Components’
- Check ‘Microsoft Internet Controls’
- Hit OK
To add a miniature browser to your application, drag the WebBrowser control represented by a globe icon out onto your form.
The white space that appears will become your browsing window. It is, in essence, the main part of the Internet Explorer screen, without the title bar or navigation buttons.
The main commands for controlling your WebBrowser control are very simple. Let’s cover them now:
Visiting a Site
To visit a site, call the Navigate method, passing a Web address. Once a site has loaded into the WebBrowser control, the surfer can use it just like Internet Explorer. Let’s look at two quick samples for opening a site:
WebBrowser1.Navigate (txtWebAddress.Text)
WebBrowser1.Navigate ("http://www.vbworld.com/")
Navigating a Site
Once you’re at a site, you may want to move around, going backwards and forwards. You can do that easily via the GoBack and GoForward methods, like this:
WebBrowser1.GoBack WebBrowser1.GoForward
Refreshing and Stopping
If a site is taking too long to load, the user might want to stop it, then refresh. Or perhaps the surfer just needs to refresh and view the latest information. The Stop and Refresh methods of the WebBrowser control work just like Internet Explorer and can be run like this:
WebBrowser1.Stop WebBrowser1.Refresh
Searching for Home
To visit the default home page, you can run the simple GoHome method. And if you want to display the default search page, try out the GoSearch method. Here’s an example:
WebBrowser1.GoHome WebBrowser1.GoSearch
Handling Errors
It’s worth noting that a lot of WebBrowser commands are prone to silly, menial errors, so feel free to use ‘On Error Resume Next’ statements liberally.
There are two properties and one main event that will help you build Internet-aware applications with the WebBrowser control:
Location Name
When you’re at a site, you can retrieve the title as would typically appear in the Internet Explorer title bar caption by retrieving the LocationName property. Here’s an example:
MsgBox WebBrowser1.LocationName
Location URL
You can retrieve the current Web address by grabbing the LocationURL property, as would typically appear in the Internet Explorer Address bar. Here’s an example:
MsgBox WebBrowser1.LocationURL
Document Complete
The DocumentComplete event of the WebBrowser control fires up when any Web page has finished loading. This is the ideal event under which to write code to update possible title and address bars. Here’s an example:
Private Sub WebBrowser1_DocumentComplete(ByVal pDisp As _
Object, URL As Variant)
Me.Caption = WebBrowser1.LocationName
txtWebAddress.Text = WebBrowser1.LocationURL
End Sub
If you fancy adding a Progress Bar to indicate how fast your Web page commands are moving along, you’re in luck the WebBrowser control has an event designed specially for this purpose.
To use, you first need to add a Progress Bar to your application. This control ships with Visual Basic and can be added to your project by clicking ‘Projects’, ‘Components’ and selecting ‘Microsoft Windows Common Controls 6.0’.
Here’s a piece of sample code that uses the WebBrowser ProgressChange event to alter a simple Progress Bar:
Private Sub WebBrowser1_ProgressChange(ByVal _ Progress As Long, ByVal ProgressMax As Long) On Error Resume Next ProgressBar1.Max = ProgressMax ProgressBar1.Value = Progress ProgressBar1.Refresh End Sub
After inserting this code, try visiting a Web site or clicking a link then monitor the progress visually.
If you’re creating a custom browser, you may wish to restrict certain Web sites. You do this by intercepting the request to visit a Web site with the BeforeNavigate2 event.
Here’s a chunk of sample code that doesn’t allow the user to visit playboy.com:
Private Sub WebBrowser1_BeforeNavigate2
(ByVal pDisp As Object, _
URL As Variant, Flags As _
Variant, TargetFrameName As Variant, _
PostData As Variant, Headers As Variant, _
Cancel As Boolean)
If InStr(1, URL, "playboy.com") Then
Cancel = True
MsgBox "Sorry, that site is restricted!"
End If
End Sub
This works by checking the passed URL (Web Address). If it contains the string ‘playboy.com’, the action is cancelled and a message box displayed. Otherwise, if everything is A-OK, access to the site is allowed.
It’s worth noting that this code will work equally as well in either the BeforeNavigate or BeforeNavigate2 events. Users of Visual Basic 6 will only have BeforeNavigate2, whilst Visual Basic 5 folk may have both. There is very little different between the two methods. For more information, consult the help file.
As most users are acquainted with typing their Web addresses into Combo Boxes, you may want to use the same.
However Internet Explorer allows you to either press the ‘Go’ button to visit the typed site, or merely hit return. You can detect if return has been pressed like this:
Private Sub Combo1_KeyPress(KeyAscii As Integer)
If KeyAscii = vbKeyReturn Then
WebBrowser1.Navigate (Combo1.Text)
End If
End Sub
It’s also possible to turn a regular Text Box into an Internet Explorer 5 style Web address list with the help of a very sneaky API call.
In this brief printable guide, we covered all the main features of the WebBrowser control.
We discovered how to visit sites, navigate backwards and forwards between Web pages, use Progress Bars, restrict naughty Net stops, plus enhance a basic Combo Box.
As you’ve found out, the WebBrowser control is an easy and simple way to add Internet capabilities to any application. I hope this article is helpful in wiring up your programs.
And on that note, I’ll wish you good luck and good-bye!
