Techie question: Internet Explorer

[AWB]

I know, this isn't quite the board for this. But I trust answers I get here more.

A customer of mine has many HTML pages he wants to load and print on a timely basis. (The HTML pages are generated from a database that's changing constantly.) We've figured out how to have Internet Explorer (IE) load the pages in succession and to print them once loaded. But here's the kicker: he wants this to run without the viewer being active; that is, he wants to run this from a command line, then have it go on its merry way.

My initial argument to him was that this was probably not possible because:

IE was designed as an interactive program; just because you can make it do something automatic doesn't mean that IE would've provided a means to eliminate the viewer.
IE being a Windows program, it's going to by necessity have a window.
If something untoward happened, there'd be no way to see what error occurred.

I offered that we could load an inital page, have it minimize itself, then chain on to the actual pages that he needed to load and print. No go. So I said I'd investigate it more this afternoon.

Well, I did and haven't found out anything useful. So I turn to the TM to see if they have the knowledge.

[Padeye]

I think it's just a matter of using the wrong tool for the job, the "when you have only have a hammer everything looks like a nail" syndrome. IE will take a URL as a command line parameter but AFAIK there are no command line switches to run it minimized. The best workaround I know is to shrink IW to a small window then close it. When you execute from command line it remembers the last window size and location. You can leave the window mostly off the desktop. Not what your client wants but as close as I could get.

[Joe Malik]

A search at CNet for "web download" yielded:

WebVCR (http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10067-100-910442.html?tag=st.cn.sr.dl.3)

WebZip (http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10067-100-2458625.html?tag=st.cn.sr.dl.2)

Offline Explorer 1.3.273 Service Release 3 (http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10067-100-2650515.html?tag=st.dl.10000_103_1.lst.td)

And many others.

If you need additional functionality not provided by these packages, all major C++ and Java compiler vendors provide class libraries to interact directly with the underlying HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) used to access the web; it should be a simple task to code the relevant functionality.

[galt]

Hmmm. If you want to do a little VB or javascripting, you could probably do this. I am not in a position to look it up now, but I recall that there is a COM interface for driving internet explorer, and that you can create an instance and load a web page without displaying a window (generally, this would be used for waiting until the page is completely loaded before making the window visible). I believe that the interface gives you access to the print functionality, so it may be as simple as (and this is javascript pseudocode):

var duh = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.whateverThatWasCalled");

duh.LoadURL("http://somethingorother");
duh.Print();

I'll try to dig this up later.