Controlling Internet Explorer from Java

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Paul Battersby - 25 Jun 2005 23:34 GMT

Can anyone point me in the direction of information on how to control
Internet Explorer from Java?

From Java, I want to tell Internet Explorer to load a page from a given Url
(this I can already do) and then have my Java Program read the HTML that is
being displayed by Internet Explorer.

Is there some DDE interface or some other way I can issue commands and get
results back from
Internet Explorer?

Thanks,

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Andrew Thompson - 26 Jun 2005 01:59 GMT

> Can anyone point me in the direction of information on how to control
> Internet Explorer from Java?

Javascript - LiveConnect - Applet - Socket.

JS communicates via LiveConnect with the (signed) Applet,
which then communicates with the application via socket.

( This route has a large learning curve. )

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Andrew Thompson - 26 Jun 2005 03:20 GMT

> Can anyone point me in the direction of information on how to control
> Internet Explorer ..

As an aside. That is a bit tricky - if the end user
browses the net using Safari..

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Roedy Green - 26 Jun 2005 08:37 GMT

>Can anyone point me in the direction of information on how to control
>Internet Explorer from Java?
>
>From Java, I want to tell Internet Explorer to load a page from a given Url
>(this I can already do) and then have my Java Program read the HTML that is
>being displayed by Internet Explorer.

Perhaps what would be much easier is to get IE out the picture, and
just pretend to be a browser yourself and send off a CGI get,
retrieving the HTML. Then extract what you want from it using a
parser.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/parser.html
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/cgi.html

If you actually want to see the bits that IE renders, look at the
Robots class. (sp?) to do a screen snapshot.

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Paul Battersby - 26 Jun 2005 20:48 GMT

The problem I'm having is that I want to automatically download some HTML
from a web site but the remote server seems to deny my request when it comes
from a Java program but allows me to see the data when I access the web site
with Internet Explorer. My program works fine with other web sites, just not
this one in particular.

Any ideas?

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Roland - 26 Jun 2005 23:04 GMT

> The problem I'm having is that I want to automatically download some HTML
> from a web site but the remote server seems to deny my request when it comes
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
>
> Any ideas?

Probably that website checks the "User-Agent" header of the HTTP request.
You could try to set the property "http.agent" to a value that matches
Internet Explorer or another well known browser. Java uses the value of
this property when it sends a HTTP request (i.e. probably when using a
HTTPURLConnection). See
<http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/net/properties.html>

You can specify the value of "http.agent" either at the commandline, like

java "-Dhttp.agent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
your.app.Main

or in your program:

// IE6/W2K
System.setProperty("http.agent",
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)");

// Moz 1.7.8/W2K
System.setProperty("http.agent",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8)
Gecko/20050511");

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Roland de Ruiter
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Wibble - 27 Jun 2005 00:32 GMT

>> The problem I'm having is that I want to automatically download some HTML
>> from a web site but the remote server seems to deny my request when it
[quoted text clipped - 29 lines]
> "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8)
> Gecko/20050511");

The site may have activeX controls that java will never understand.
Jacob is a Java/Com interface that will let you control explorer. It
should do what you want.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacob-project/

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Controlling Internet Explorer from Java

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