XMetaL 8.0 Enterprise: Internal browser/preview issue

[paorear]

Hi guys – we do some significant tweaking of the processing logic to create an HTML page for preview. When we load it in response to the preview event, it loads successfully, but it doesn't seem to render as we desire.

Are you using the Windows Shell IE web browser component, or some other browser component?

If we instead use Preview in browser and point to iexplore.exe, all displays as expected.

The page being previewed does reference some javascript and an online jquery URL like:

   

Why would the external browser preview correctly, but not the internal?

Any help greatly appreciated!

Paul O'Rear

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[XMetaLOldTimer]

Yes, XMetaL's Page Preview is implemented by hosting the Shell IE web browser control.  XMetaL will call the control's Navigate2() API passing the BrowserURL property value that your custom script setup.

I am not sure about robustness of said script running within just the IE control versus the stand-alone IE application…but, it is unlikely that is causing your issue.  I suspect Windows Firewall or similar is blocking the XMetaL process from fetching content over http/https.

Regards,
Addam 

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[paorear]

Thanks Addam – I was suspecting that with the firewall, too, but have not been able to isolate anything like that yet.

Paul O'Rear

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[paorear]

I found the solution to the issue via this blog post:
[url=http://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2011/May/21/Web-Browser-Control-Specifying-the-IE-Version]http://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2011/May/21/Web-Browser-Control-Specifying-the-IE-Version[/url]

and this documentation:
[url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ee330730(v=vs.85).aspx]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ee330730(v=vs.85).aspx[/url]

Apparently, the web browser control when hosted in an application defaults to the IE 7 rendering mode. There's no easy way to say “use the latest version” when hosting the control. You can, however, specify a simple registry entry on a per .exe basis that then effectively enables the desired emulation mode for the host application.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMAINFeatureControlFEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]
“xmetal80.exe”=dword:00002af9

The problem in my case was that we were leveraging some HTML 5 CSS features that were not supported in IE 7. Making this tweak solved everything.

Hopefully this may help others as well.

Paul O'Rear

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