We’re in the unfortunate position of having to use a JavaScript control intended for a web page inside our Windows desktop application. To accomplish this, we host Internet Explorer inside our application and tell it to navigate to a local web page. We then get the IDispatch interface of the script engine and use it to interact with the control. The web page looks something like this:
<html>
<head>
<script src="third party website url" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body onload="OurApp.OnLoad()">
</body>
</html>
(I’ve omitted some tags and attributes for clarity.) We add the “OurApp” object to the script engine’s namespace. It’s an IDispatch interface that allows the script to call back into our application. In our application’s OnLoad() method, we construct various JavaScript objects defined by the control.
Problem:
In 99% of cases, this set-up works great. Unfortunately, on some customer machines, our OnLoad() method can’t find any of the expected methods in the script engine. It’s like the JavaScript from the third party’s website either didn’t load or wasn’t allowed to run. For many customers, we’ve resolved the issue by changing the security settings in Internet Explorer. But now we have some customers where the security settings appear to be correct, but we’re still encountering the problem.
As an added wrinkle, if I create a web page as above and have the customer open it on his machine, he gets a popup bar asking him to authorize the active content and then everything works fine once he agrees. (In this page I’ve replaced the OurApp.OnLoad() call with some JavaScript that does the same thing.) This is the same behaviour I get on my machine, but our application works fine here. We aren’t getting any error messages at all on the customer’s machine (though maybe we’re just not looking in the right places).
So, I’m stumped. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greately appreciated.
Update
We’ve finally managed to resolve the problem. The issue was that we were passing an unsupported locale to the third party website. In this case, they were returning as an empty script instead of a close match or reasonable default.
You might want to implement your own security manager:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537182(VS.85).aspx