| Re: Launching Another App. from IDL [message #40398] |
Thu, 05 August 2004 14:34 |
Rick Towler
Messages: 821
Registered: August 1998
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Senior Member |
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M. Katz wrote:
> I'm wondering if on Windows there's an easy IDL command that is
> capable of launching an external application. What I'd like to do is
> to have an IDL widget button be able to launch Internet Explorer (or a
> better browser) and direct it to a specific URL. There must be some
> kind of ActiveX thing that can do this, no? I don't want to have to
> write a big external library and all that hooey.
>
> Thanks!
> M. Katz
You can use the WIDGET_ACTIVEX() function and you could use SPAWN
(iexplore "insert your url here"). The issue you'll run into is
determining if an alternate browser is available. To be safe I would
stick with IE but you could write a procedure which would look for
Opera, Moz, Firefox in at least their default locations.
When WIDGET_ACTIVEX was born, I wrote a windows only HTML help widget
which demonstrates the use of WIDGET_ACTIVEX. It is simply an IDL
widget window with IE embedded in it (no controls, although right clicks
in the window bring up the IE context menu). I don't know how specific
the COM ID is so I can't guarantee that this will work with all versions
of IE.
You can pick up Dialog_WinHTMLHelp here:
http://www.acoustics.washington.edu/~towler/programs/directI nputDLM.zip
-Rick
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| Re: Launching Another App. from IDL [message #40404 is a reply to message #40398] |
Thu, 05 August 2004 12:40  |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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M. Katz writes:
> I'm wondering if on Windows there's an easy IDL command that is
> capable of launching an external application. What I'd like to do is
> to have an IDL widget button be able to launch Internet Explorer (or a
> better browser) and direct it to a specific URL. There must be some
> kind of ActiveX thing that can do this, no? I don't want to have to
> write a big external library and all that hooey.
This seems to work in all versions of IDL for a local
web page:
IDL> ONLINE_HELP, BOOK='C:/CoyoteGuide/index.html'
Cheers,
David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
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