News

September 25, 2024

Bug fix release of AntView version 1.1.460

Brought back the non functional events that had been hidden in 1.1.458.
So that’s a return of OnClick, OnDblClick, OnKeyPress, OnMouseEnter and OnMouseLeave.

Hiding these events caused an issue in some of the development environments if the events had been referenced in the code.
Even while those events are non functional, a reference to those events could prevent a developer from the ability to open their forms in their development environment. Which obviously never should be an issue with a simple update.

September 24, 2024

Release of AntView version 1.1.458

AntView interface
Property:

  • RegisteredPath

Fixes:

  • Hidden the following events: OnClick, OnDblClick, OnMouseEnter, OnMouseLeave and OnKeyPress as WebView2 does not expose any of those and AntView should not expose what isn’t there.

Demo:
The Visual FoxPro examples have been completely revised by VFP developer Tam Dobie. They new examples are much better and are comparable to the VB6 examples. There’s also extra help and instructions included with the new examples that are very worthwhile to study if you are a VFP developer.

The VB6 demo has improvements on the FillForm example(s). Now a textbox is used for output, so that it is easier to directly see what the various button clicks give as a result.

There’s a fix for the background image in the exchangeRates demo of every development platform.
The exchange rates demo stopped showing the fancy background image that was loaded from an external resource. This has been corrected and now loads the image from a resource we control.

AntView version 2.0.459 BETA

September 24, 2024

AntView version 2.0 is built against the very latest WebView2 API, released yesterday and as such we will be able to add a lot of new features to the AntView version 2.0 control over time.

But of course we add new functionality right now as well.

New functionality:

AntView interface

Properties:

AntViewProfile interface

Properties:

AntViewBasicAuthenticationRequestedEventArgs interface

Properties:

AntViewBasicAuthenticationResponse interface

Properties:

There’s a new utility called “RegisterAssistant” that you can use to temporarily disable either the AntView 1.x and/or the AntView 2.x controls. It does this by unregistering the control. You can also use the same utility to enable the control again.
This helps as it allows you to make it much easier to test that your application does not depend on an older version of the control by mistake. There are separate 32 bit and 64 bit versions of this utility to enable/disable 32 bit or 64 bit versions of the control.

Fixes:

  • Hidden the following events: OnClick, OnDblClick, OnMouseEnter, OnMouseLeave and OnKeyPress as WebView2 does not expose any of those and AntView should not expose what isn’t there.

Installer:

As Microsoft has plans to remove WordPad from Windows, we can no longer assume that Windows is able to open the readme.rtf file immediately after install. Instead of having to depend on being able to open a rtf file, we now open a page on our website via the default browser.

Please note that we do not pass any data on opening that page.

Help:
The AntView 2.0 help moved to a new location, it can be found at: https://doc.antwise.com/antview2/
The help has a new section “What’s New” that lists the changes in each release.

Demo:
Visual Fox Pro:
The Visual FoxPro examples have been completely revised by VFP developer Tam Dobie. They new examples are much better and are comparable to the VB6 examples. There’s also extra help and instructions included with the new examples that are very worthwhile to study if you are a VFP developer.

The AntView2 version of the VFP examples also include an example on how you can handle opening links in a new tab page.

Visual Basic:
The VB6 demo has improvements on the FillForm example(s). Now a textbox is used for output, so that it is easier to directly see what the various button clicks give as a result.

The VB6 demo now also has a form that shows how-to use basic authentication and there’s also a form that show cases the different ways in which you can handle new window behavior and do things like open a link in another browser tab page.

Every development environment:
There’s a fix for the background image in the exchangeRates demo of every development platform.
The exchange rates demo stopped showing the fancy background image that was loaded from an external resource. This has been corrected and now loads the image from a resource we control.

June 13, 2024

Release of version 1.1.375

Fixes:

  • Fix for setting global UserDataFolder during OnCreate. If you tried to set the UserDataFolder via the global object and then called CreateWebView from the OnCreate event, the control was created before the global setting was applied and as such the global UserDataFolder setting was ignored. This has been addressed.
  • Fix RequestSubmitByName, issuing a form submit by attribute name did not work.
  • Fix AntViewDocument, functions using getElementById to see if a html element exists had faulty testing by checking for undefined instead of null. As a result the “ById” functions would not return an error if the html element was not found. This has been corrected.
  • Fix Visible state, changing the visible property was being ignored as it was not passed on to the webview2 control itself.

Installer:
Added a shortcut in the Windows start menu to the examples.

Examples:
A new demo was added that uses the old WebBrowser control to host the AntView control. The demo is started from a simple vbs script file.

The demo page with images that displayed the “map local folder to hostname” feature wasn’t showing the fancy images any more as those where loaded from an external resource. This has been corrected and now load the images from a resource we control.

New functionality:

AntView interface

Methods:

AntViewDocument interface

Methods:

Events:

January 22, 2024

Release of version 1.1.354

Changes:
Removed an optimisation on NavigateSync, NavigateToStringSync, CreateWebViewSync and NavigateWithWebResourceRequestSync. The optimisation caused these methods to fail under certain circumstances.

Installer:
Changed default on uninstaller to remove demo by default. This is needed because if you do not uninstall the old demo’s then the installer won’t install the new demo’s. This is especially problematic for Visual FoxPro as there the examples have required details for the events, so you won’t be able to use the new version of the control without those additions. You will only see this after installing this version (as the uninstaller is part of what gets installed)

Examples:
The Visual Basic 6 demo has been improved. It now also includes a synchronous version of the Fill Form Demo to illustrate the difference in techniques used.

New functionality:

AntViewDocument interface

Methods:

Events:

November 22, 2023

Release of version 1.1.330

Fixed an issue with RequestFormSubmitById/RequestFormSubmitByName when used in a form that used the GET method.

New functionality:

AntView interface

Methods:

AntViewDocument interface

Methods:

Events:

September 4, 2023

Release of version 1.1.316

Bugfix release. The errorCode parameter in the OnCapturePreviewCompleted event was originally of datatype HResult and is now corrected to type Int. The reason being that VB6 could not use it.

August 31, 2023

Release of version 1.1.314

New functionality:

AntView interface

Properties:

Methods:

Events:

Extended the AntViewNewWindowRequestedEventArgs interface

Methods:

February 21, 2023

Release of version 1.1.270

New functionality:

AntView interface

Properties:

Methods:

Events:

  • OnDocumentPlayingAudioChanged
  • OnDownloadDialogOpenChanged
  • OnMutedChanged

New AntViewCookieManager interface

Methods:

Events:

New AntViewCookieList interface

Properties:

Method:

Events:

New AntViewCookie interface

Properties:

Events:

Bugfix/Changed behavior:

The online help system has been touched up a bit to work closer to how the Windows CHM help works and looks like.

January 6, 2023

Release of version 1.1.236

New functionality:

AntView interface

Properties:

Methods:

Events:

AntViewDocument interface

Methods:

Events:

AntViewNewWindowRequestedEventArgs interface

Properties

New AntViewDeferral interface to be able to postpone destroying of objects so you can complete tasks.

Methods:

Events:

New AntViewPhysicalKeyStatus to assist with OnAcceleratorKeyPressed.
Properties:

Events:

New AntViewWebResourceRequestedEventArgs interface to assist with OnWebResourceRequested and Filters.

Properties:

Events:

New AntViewWebResourceResponse interface to assist with AntViewWebResourceRequestedEventArgs interface

Properties

Events:

Bugfix/Changed behavior

Fix installer issue trying to register 64 bit version of AntView when running on a 32 bit operating system.

The logging functionality now supports more detailed logging by setting LogMode to level 2. At level 2 more details are logged such as URL’s and all the triggered events. It does not include sensitive information such as certificates or html contents (unless you use NavigateToString).

The help documentation has been revised to include more details and be easier to navigate.

July 14, 2022

Release of version 1.1.200

New functionality:

AntView interface

New AntViewFrame interface for directly interacting with iframes.
Properties:

Methods:

Events:

Added AntViewNavigationStartEventArgs2 for extending the navigation structure data:

AntViewDocument interface

  • FrameDispatch, this method allows you to connect the document interface to an iframe object.

AntViewDownloadOperation interface

AntViewWebResourceResponseView interface

Bugfix/Changed behavior

The Synchronous methods from the document interface cannot be run from within an event due to the nature of how it works. This now returns an error indicating the reason instead of just locking up.

Fixed AntViewNavigationStartEventArgs.RequestHeaders. See the following forum post for details about the bug report: VB6: NavigateWithWebResourceRequest method without headers

Returning a boolean value via runAnonymousFunction would crash the control. This has been fixed by supporting boolean return values and casting that to a string. In addition the exception handling on this was extended so that the control no longer crashes if it cannot cast the result to a string.

OnPermissionRequested was broken as state did not work as expected. For more details see OnPermissionRequested from Powerbuilder

June 7, 2022

Release of version 1.1.175

Minor update.

In the past the AntView control would not work when you run under an old compatibility mode. For example if you run your Visual Basic IDE in Windows XP compatibility mode then the control would not work as Windows XP is not a supported environment for WebView2. Setting the compatibility mode now no longer blocks the control from working.

May 27, 2022

Release of version 1.1.174

Bug Fix/Changed behavior

  • Setting UserAgent property is now also cached, so that you can set it before the WebView2 control has been created.
  • NavigateWithWebResourceRequest now supports setting headers.

New functionality:
The AntViewDocument interface now has synchronous wrapper functions for each asynchronous function available. This makes it easier to use as well as opens this functionality to environments such as PowerBuilder and OpenText Gupta Team Developer.

Demo

  • The DataFlex demo has a new postData view.
  • Added a demo for PowerBuilder users.

May 11, 2022

Release of version 1.1.164 beta

Changes, the following 3 items are described in “Important Changes in AntView 1.1“.
Please read that article when you are upgrading!

New functionality:

Added an extra set of methods & events for VB6 as it does not have Int64 support.
Other environments such as Visual FoxPro and PowerBuilder also benefit from this.
For the events you have to set the EventsUseHexadecimal property to switch to use VB6 compatible events.

Also added for VB6 an alternative method for the CurrentBrowser property in the AntViewDocument interface via new method BrowserDispatch, which then can be connected via the new property IDispatchPointer.

New properties

New methods

New events:

GlobalAntView: a global object to use for applying global default settings for all your AntView controls to use:

Demo

We now have created a new excel file per demo and added dynamic resizing on startup so that the demo looks good at 100% DPI as well as at 150% DPI.

Added a Visual Basic 6 demo.

March 9, 2022

Release of version 1.0.111-2

The Excel file demo was corrupted.
As a result we now have re-released 1.0.111 with the Excel demo from 1.0.89 as a quick fix.

The AntView control itself hasn’t changed.

March 8, 2022

Release of version 1.0.111

Bug Fix

  • Fix for fullscreen switch, when you switch back it would show a title bar in the control, this was not the intention.

New functionality:

Demo

  • The DataFlex demo shows how-to use PrintToPdf in EdgeWebBrowserDemo.vw
  • The DataFlex demo now has prettier buttons.
  • The Excel demo was designed for high DPI (at 150% DPI) and that made it look really weird on 100% DPI. Screens have been adjusted to 100% DPI.
  • The Excel demo has a new form that shows how-to dynamically create the browser control.
  • There’s a very early example on how-to use the control in Visual Fox Pro.

Various changes:

  • We’re now bundling the WebView2loader.dll version 1108.44, we strongly recommend to use this newer dll.
  • When the WebView2loader dll is loaded, it will now check on loading if the bitness matches. If the control tries to load a 64 bit DLL in a 32 bit process it will now show a clear error message. Same for trying to load a 32 bit DLL in a 64 bit process.
  • When you enable logging it will now log more details and on errors it will log the windows error.
  • Several properties were ignored if set/get before the WebView2 control was loaded. This is now addressed for the following properties: DefaultContextMenusEnabled, BrowserAcceleratorKeysEnabled, BuiltInErrorPageEnabled, DefaultScriptDialogsEnabled, DevToolsEnabled, ScriptEnabled, StatusBarEnabled, WebMessageEnabled, ZoomControlEnabled.
  • A demo license is now only installed when using the installer. This helps to make it more clear if the control is properly licensed during deploy.

November 30, 2021

Release of version 1.0.89

Bug Fix

  • Fix changed behavior for OnCreateWebviewCompleted as it was now send one time too often before the WebView was created due to a missed begin/end clause after adding the logging logic.

November 29, 2021

Release of version 1.0.88

Bug Fix

  • Fix a double free on OnWebMessageReceived under certain circumstances when the user sends a JSON message.
  • Fix for Visual Basic. Moved all “WebView not instantiated” errors to LastErrorMessage instead of throwing an error and return false for the properties or empty string. This fixes an issue with not being able to save changes in VB6.

New functionality:

Other new functionality:

  • Added an icon for Antview that is used in the ToolBox of VB6 and other development tools.
  • On the developer machine where AntView was installed, the control will now first load the WebView2Loader.dll from the default installation location of AntView. This way it will always match the supplied set by us and you don’t need to worry about copying in WebView2Loader.dll into your development environment. You do still need to take care of the DLL dependency during deployment. This also means that during development it will automatically load the dll with the correct bitness.
  • A logging feature has been added for troubleshooting purposes. This is only active after activation via a registry setting. See the documentation (Deployment -> Troubleshooting) for details.

Installer:
During install, the installer will look for Excel AntViewAx.exd cache files of the interface and try to delete those. This should make it easier for Excel users to use new functionality added to the control when you update.

Demo

  • Typo in the DataFlex WebMessage Demo, Post JSON button is using PostWebMessageAsString instead of PostWebMessageAsJson.
  • WebMessage demo: Serialize the JSON in the html before displaying it.
  • The Excel demo now also has a webmessage example.
  • Added MapLocalFolderToHostName example to the WebBrowserDemo.

November 10, 2021

Release of version 1.0.74

Bug Fix
Fixed a hang when using Tab or Shift+Tab to navigate out of the Antview control.

New functionality:

Installer:
No longer installs the examples under the user account, but instead under all users as it caused issues on some windows server versions when not installing with Administrator privileges. For these users the examples got installed in a non accessible area. Fixed by installing the demo under the “C:\Users\Public\Public Documents” folder.

Help documentation:

  • Generate Source package in DataFlex
  • Deployment

Demo

Small improvements to the DataFlex demo.
Added a new view that displays how webmessage works, used the same view as an example for how-to set custom focus behavior when you navigate out of the control with Tab or Shift-Tab key.

September 6, 2021

Release of version 1.0.68

  • Added a new demo for Microsoft Excel, where the demo’s run via Visual Basic for Applications.
  • AntViewDocument interface did not check if EventSink was wired before calling an event. This has been fixed (this was only an issue for Excel)
  • Added DefaultUserDataFolderLocation property, the default location is now set to be under the user temp folder. For more details see the online documentation for DefaultUserDataFolderLocation
  • The Events OnExecuteScript and OnCreateWebviewCompleted used data type HRESULT and as that’s an unsigned long, VBA would not work. Changed it to variable names HResult and passing as long instead. (this change has no effect for DataFlex as it already considered HRESULT a long instead of a ulong)
  • Updated the installer script, uninstall now unregisters the activex controls.
  • Improvements to the help documentation.
  • Small improvements to the DataFlex demo. For example, displaying time left on the demo license, fix url by inserting protocol if the user types a website in the browser demo. Reset output to zero in the exchangeResult demo.

August 24, 2021

First official release on a brand new website!