Question

I was learning about custom protocols for few days, and there’s one thing that I don’t understand.
I know how to start an app with custom protocol, but My question is,
Is it possible to get apps response and print it in Web Browser using javascript?
For example If I will send request to protocol myapp:// , that will open an app written in C#, and that app will return string “This is response” can to print it in Web Browser?
If so, can you help me to accomplish it?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Internet protocols aren’t all about browsers.

mailto: causes an action in an email program (e.g. start a new email)

ftp: causes an action in an FTP program (which might be integrated into a web browser or Windows Explorer)

gopher: (well, that’s not really prevalent anymore)

myapp:// will cause your (C#) app to start running. At that point, it can do anything a C# app can do. One thing it could choose to do is create a .html file on disk, and use

Process.Start("file://Path/To/My.html")

to cause the default web browser to open the document it just created.

UPDATE

You can certainly have your myapp:// protocol handler send an update to the web server that hosts the page in question. My assumption here is that the myapp:// handler is running on a client machine, and there is a web server on a different URL http://mydomain.com serving a page that includes a myapp:// reference.

1. Web server renders a page that includes both a myapp:// URL and Ajax code to periodically query the web server for updates to part of the HTML body.
2. User clicks the myapp:// URL
3. Protocol handler runs
4. Protocol handler sends an update to the web server, e.g. http://mydomain.com?user=joe&result=123
5. Web server uses ?user=joe&result=123 to update response next time the Ajax callback is initiated
6. Ajax callback gets updated data for page from web server, updates page.