Title: Adding HTML Resources to Dll and Exe that IE can reference
Question: If you want to add html pages to your dll or exe in delphi it is a simple matter of adding the pages as resources. This article covers adding html and image files to the resource, and how to pass infromation to the html file to make it a bit more dynamic.
Answer:
Stage 1) How do we add an image or html document to a exe or dll.
Create a file in the project directory (e.g. called MyProjectRes.rc). The easiest application to create this in is notepad, you can create it in delphi, but make sure the extension is .rc.
Choose Project-Add To Project... then change the Files of Type to Resource File (*.rc), select the .rc file (e.g. MyProjectRes.rc) and choose Open.
In the RC file we can add lines that define the resource to include. These are of the format :
[Resource Name][Space or Tab][Resource Type][Space or Tab][Filename of resource]
e.g
PICTURE1 GIF ".\Images\MyImage.gif"
Delphi should have automatically added a line into the project source (e.g. {$R 'HTMLResources.res' 'HTMLResources.rc'}) so when the project is built it will automatically compile the Resource script file (.rc) into a resource *.res.
You can now access these resources in code by using a TResourceStream or TBitmap.LoadFromResource for example.
Stage 2) Specifying HTML resources and images.
If we used the above example of a resource (PICTURE1 GIF ".\Images\MyImage.gif") then we can reference the resource via Internet Explorer as the URL
res://c:\program%20files\mydll.dll/GIF/PICTURE1
The Url starts with the res:// followed by the path to the dll or exe with the resource (using backslash not forward slash) then /[Resource Type]/[Resource Name]
If you wish to add a resource that can be accessed directly with out the need to specify the Resource Type portion of the URL then you can add it as follows :
Name 2110 DISCARDABLE "path to file"
The type 2110 allows the resource to be referenced at the root of the url e.g.
res://c:\program%20files\mydll.dll/Name
The discardable option means that if windows needs memory then this resource can be release and only reloaded when needed.
Stage 3) Creating a dynamic HTML resource
It is possible, to use the querystring part of a URL to send parameters or information to the HTML resource. To do this we use a bit of java script to extract the querystring from the URL.
e.g. I created this Javascript function to extract text between # and ##
function Homepage(){
DocURL=document.location.href;
BeginInfo=DocURL.indexOf("#")+1;
EndInfo=DocURL.indexOf("##");
urlresult=DocURL.substring(BeginInfo,EndInfo);
document.write('' + unescape(urlresult) + "");
}
This is simply called a the the appropriate point to insert the querystring text there.
Homepage();
I can the use a resource like res://c:\program%20files\mydll.dll/error#My Message to display##
Note in the JavaScript function the use of unesacpe to remove the %20 that IE puts in instead of the spaces.
Images and other resources can be referenced as relative paths from the dll resource.
e.g img src="GIF/ImageUnderGIFType" width="50" height="45" or img src="GIFAtRoot" width="50" height="45"
Have Fun.....
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