Zeta HTML Edit Control

Introduction

This articles presents you a small wrapper class around the Windows Forms 2.0 WebBrowser control.

Features

The wrapper is no rocket science but provides some features I struggled with in the past. We use the control in several of our own (internal) applications.

Some of the features include:

• Enable the setting of text even when the control is not yet fully initialized.
• Allow pasting of images from the clipboard.
• Provide an alternative context menu for applying formatting options.
• Optionally directly edit the underlying HTML source code.
• Translated resources in English and German.
• Interface IExternalInformationProvider for externally persisting and restoring settings.
• Provide standard CSS in the control; usually you do not need to define your own CSS.

Using the code

To include the code in your own project, simply include the "ZetaHtmlEditControl.dll" assembly into your project.

Add the assembly to your Visual Studio .NET 2008 Windows Forms Designer Toolbox if you want to be able to drag the ExtendedWebBrowser control to your forms. Alternatively create and initialize an instance of the ExtendedWebBrowser control by code.

Setting HTML

To put HTML from your code into the control, assign the HTML code to the ExtendedWebBrowser.DocumentText property. You do not have to pass a complete HTML document with HEAD and BODY tags but only the actual content that you would write inside the BODY tag.

Getting the HTML

To read out the HTML from the control, call the ExtendedWebBrowser.GetDocumentText( string folderPath ) method. The method takes one parameter "folderPath" that tells the control where to store newly passed images from the clipboard.

Summary

This article quickly introduced a wrapper around the Windows Forms 2.0 WebBrowser control that adds some extra functions to make it more usable in a real-world-application. Feel free to copy, modify or extend the control to match your own requirements.

To ask questions, suggest features or provide other comments, please use the Discussions tab.

History

• 2009-11-18 - First public release to CodePlex.com.