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Manny Silva - 22 Nov 2006 21:28 GMT

Hi,

Is there any way to simply generate Html and then display it in the
WebControl that is available in the Windows.Forms namespace in the .Net 2.0
framework? It seems like it should be a fairly straight-forward operation...
but I can't figure it out for the life of me... any pointers to concrete
examples would definitely be a great help.

Signature

Thanks in advance for your help,
Manny

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Linda Liu [MSFT] - 23 Nov 2006 08:39 GMT

Hi Manny,

I am sorry that I may not understand your question exactly.

Based on my understanding, you want a simple way to generate an HTML page
and then display it in a WebControl control. If I am off base, please feel
free to let me know.

Do you mean you're developing a Windows Forms application? The WebControl
is a web control, which resides in System.Web.UI.WebControls namespace. The
equivalent WinForms control of the WebControl is WebBrowser.

As for a simple way to generate an HTML page, you could directly add an
HTML page to a WinForms application within Visual Studio 2005. To do it, go
to menu Project | Add New Item. In the Add New Item window, select HTML
Page template and press Add button. Then you could edit the HTML page in
VS2005.

Alternatively, you could also make use of other professional editors to
generate HTML pages, such as Font Page, Dream Weaver and etc.

Hope this helps.
If you have anything unclear, please feel free to let me know.

Sincerely,
Linda Liu
Microsoft Online Community Support

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Linda Liu [MSFT] - 27 Nov 2006 04:03 GMT

Hi Manny,

How about the problem now?

If the problem is not resolved or you have anything unclear, please feel
free to let me know.

Thank you for using our MSND Managed Newsgroup Support Service!

Sincerely,
Linda Liu
Microsoft Online Community Support

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Manny Silva - 27 Nov 2006 18:29 GMT

Well, I found a quick and dirty work around for what I was trying to
accomplish. What I did was I generated the HTML dynamically and then wrote
it out to a file. I then set the WebBrowser.Url to "file://file-path.html".
Whenever I make a dynamic change, I re-save the file and then call
WebBrowser.Refresh(). This works ok, but I would far prefer to avoid writing
out to a file just to be able to preview what I am doing dynamically in
memory. So, if there is a way to do this without having to save the HTML to
a file, I would definitely appreciate any pointers I can get. If not, I now
have a workable solution.

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Thanks,
Manny

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Linda Liu [MSFT] - 29 Nov 2006 07:43 GMT

Hi Manny,

Thank you for your reply. I can understand what you want.

After doing some research, I find a workaround to display a dynamically
generated HTML in a WebBrowser control directly.

The workaround is to get the content from the stream and the then set it to
the DocumentText property of the WebBrowser control.

The following is a sample.

using System.IO;

MemoryStream mstream = new MemoryStream();
StreamWriter streamwriter = new StreamWriter(mstream);
HtmlTextWriter htmlwriter = new HtmlTextWriter(streamwriter);

// get the content from the mstream and then convert it to a string
byte[] byteArray = new byte[mstream.Length];
mstream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
mstream.Read(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);
string text = "";
for (int i = 0; i < byteArray.Length; i++)
{
text += ((char)byteArray[i]).ToString();
}
// assign the converted text to the DocumentText property of the webBrowser
webBrowser1.DocumentText = text;

mstream.Close();
streamwriter.Close();
htmlwriter.Close();

I have performed a test on the above code and confirmed it works.

BTW, as for the way to generate an HTML in memory, I think HtmlTextWriter
is a good option.

Please try my suggestion and let me know the result.

Sincerely,
Linda Liu
Microsoft Online Community Support

Reply to this Message

Linda Liu [MSFT] - 04 Dec 2006 13:58 GMT

Hi Manny,

How about the problem now?

If the problem is not resolved or you have anything unclear, please feel
free to let me know.

Thank you for using our MSDN Managed Newsgroup Support Service!

Sincerely,
Linda Liu
Microsoft Online Community Support

Reply to this Message

Manny Silva - 27 Nov 2006 14:45 GMT

Linda,

Thank you for your reply. Sorry for the delay. I didn't have access to
the Internet over the Thanksgiving holiday (and weekend). Sorry... you are
right. WebBrowser is what I was referring to. I would like to generate the
HTML in memory (that I am capable of doing, although any pointers that would
make that task easier are certainly appreciated). Currently I am using the
System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter to generate HTML dynamically. Now, my main
problem is trying to display the dynamically generated HTML in the WebBrowser
control. Is that possible? I wish to use it, basically, like a read-only
rich text edit control simply for the purpose of previewing the dynamically
generated HTML before it is saved to disk.

Does that help clarify what I am asking/trying to do?

Sorry I didn't make myself more clear to begin with... it was a last minute
post at the end of a very frustrating day :o)

Thanks,
Manny

Signature

Thanks in advance for your help,
Manny

> Hi Manny,
>
[quoted text clipped - 43 lines]
>
> This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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