Hidden advwebbrowser in a form: is it possible?

VCL TMS VCL UI Pack
1

Is it possible to have a non visible (hidden) advwebbrowser that we could use to surf and monitoring pages in a vcl program?
Either with advwebbrowser or TMSFNCEdgewebbrowser?
Do you propose a demo for that?

Sometimes it is more easy to have a web browser to surf in a webpage, as hidden process to our application's user and provided the functions through our vcl application's interface.
Thank you in advance

2

Hi,

Unfortunately no, for the webbrowser to properly initialize, it needs to be visible and have a valid handle. Once it's initialized, you can try to hide it by setting Visible := False, but it's unclear if the browser will then react to URL changes.

3

to be honest I put a advwebbrowser with visible=false in a form and with a tbutton using the following code:

procedure TForm1.AdvWebBrowser1DocumentComplete(Sender: TObject);
begin
showmessage('page loaded: '+AdvWebBrowser1.URL);
end;

procedure TForm1.AdvWebBrowser1Initialized(Sender: TObject);
begin AdvWebBrowser1.Navigate('https://www.tmssoftware.com'); end;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
AdvWebBrowser1.Visible:=true;
end;

From what I checked, initialized is fired and the page is loaded, but the "DocumentComplete" is never run.
When button is pressed, the page was loaded ok and it becomes instantly visible

4

OnDocumentComplete is not fired until you manually call StartDocumentReadyStateThread

1 Like
5

Now after a couple of seconds OnDocumentComplete is also fired.
So probably, it works for some tasks.
What should we expect not to work when not visible?

6

It's unclear, an unvisible browser most likely will not navigate