Implementing Web Browser Band Using ATL HTML Control

The Web Browser Bands were introduced in IE 4.0 , they provide
a child window (can be both Horizontal and Vertical ) within the
main explorer window. The Search, History and Favourites bars are
examples of this bar.

These bands can be used to customise the explorer, to display
information and for taking user input.

To create these bars we have to implement and register a band
object. The band objects are COM objects which exist inside a
container (i.e IE for Explorer Bars). Two main aspects for these
band objects are: 

a) How they are registered
Bands must be registered as an OLE in-process server that
supports apartment threading, the band objects must be registered
for appropriate component category. The category determines the
object type and it’s container: The Vertical Explorer Bar
requires registration in CATID_InfoBand and the Horizontal
Explorer Bar requires registration in CATID_CommBand.

b) The interfaces they expose
The interfaces a band object must implement are IDeskBand,
IObjectWithSite and IPersistStream. We will get into the
specifics of interfaces later in the article. If the band object
is to accept user input it has to implement IInputObject 
and for a context menu it has to implement IContextMenu.

About the ATL HTML Control

The HTML control hosts the Intrenet Explorer WebBrowser
control thus giving you access to script parsing, rendering and
browsing fcilities of IE. By default the user interface of the
control is provided by the WebBrowser Control, this covers the
entire area of the control. The UI is rendered based on the HTML
included in the resource of your project.

The control exposes two interfaces: one is for the clients of
the control and the other with an UI suffix is used to extend
the object model of the Web Browser(being hosted by our
control). The script which can access the object model can also
access this interface (as window.external) and can call its
functions .Your C++ code can access the object model in this
function . This communication process can be exploited to
accomplish a variety of tasks. For further details on HTML
control Dr Richard Grimes book (Professional ATL COM Programming)
is the panacea.

About Registration:

For object registration as in-process server I have used the
code provided by ATL. For Registring the band object for Category
CATID_InfoBand (for Vertical Explorer Band) I have used interface
ICatRegister exposed by the Component Categories manager object
CLSID_StdComponentCategoriesMgr.

About the Interfaces:

IObjectWithSite This is very critical interface. The explorer calls
the IObjectWithSite::SetSite Method passing its site’s
unknown pointer.The following things are achieved during
this call.
If the pointer being passed is not NULL  then site
is being set , using this pointer i obtain the IOleWindow
Interface and get the parent window’s handle and store
it. I then create my HTML control as child of this
window. I store the pointer to IInputObject site
Interface for use later.Also I obtain a pointer to the
IWebBrowser2 interface of the IE (parent) and store for
use later.The IObjectWithSite::GetSite wraps call to
sites QueryInterface.
IPersistStream Since there is no persistent data there is only
minimal implementation of this interface.
IDeskBand This interface inherits from IDockingWindow and
IOleWindow.The IOleWindow::GetWindow returns the child
window handle and ContextSensitive help is not
implemented .The IDockingWindow::ShowDW and CloseDW have
been implemented but ResizeBorder is not required to be
implemented.The IDeskBand::GetBandInfo is used by
Explorer to specify the Explorer Bar’s identifier and
viewing mode.It also may request one or more pieces of
information by filling the dwMask member of the
DESKBANDINFO structure that is passed as the third
parameter

Interaction With the Script:

I have implented a function named OnNag( ) of the interface
ICHTMUI (the interface used by the webbrowser control as
explained earlier).The script calls this finction passing the
dispatch pointer to the HTML anchor element and the string
representing the site to navigate to.I use the IWebBrowser2
interface pointer stored earlier to navigate to the site.Thus a
click in the Band object causes navigation in the main IE Window.

The band.dll can be downloaded and registered .The menu item
is added in View | Explorer Bars. On selecting the menu the
Explorer bar is created .The explorer bar has links to some
sites, to which one can navigate( in the main IE Window) by
clicking on them

The project can be downloaded and by modifying the HTML
resource (carefully) you add your own links and customise the GUI
of the band.

References:

The article "Creating Custom Explorer Bars and Desk
Bands" in SBN

Download demo project – 27 KB

Download DLL – 9 KB

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