Many programmers have realized the benefits of using a browser ActiveX control within an OpenInsight form. HTML provides an easy way to deliver rich, flexible, and dynamic content. For example, this is a popular technique for building application dashboards.

There are occasions when an ActiveX browser control will not be ideal (or work at all.) A recent project required OpenInsight to display some rather complex reports that were created on-the-fly via a web service. In and of itself this was not a problem. We were able to make our request and get back the report within an XML wrapper. However, the HTML content included various elements that precluded the use of an ActiveX control, such as various dependencies upon the document object model (DOM). Therefore, another method for displaying HTML was required.

The Internet Explorer object provides us a way to launch an instance of Internet Explorer that is virtually under the control of OpenInsight. It shares the same methods and properties as the the ActiveX browser control so it will be somewhat familiar to many programmers. Comprehensive documentation can be found on the Microsoft Developer Network website.

In OpenInsight 7.1 and later you can use the Basic+ OLE/COM functionality to utilize this object. Earlier versions of OpenInsight require the assistance of third-party utilities such as our SRP_COM function. The following code samples will use the native Basic+ functionality but anyone who wishes to use SRP_COM will find that the syntax is remarkably similar.
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For some time now various methods for presenting code into web pages and portable documents have been introduced. Earlier methods simply formatted code within a gray box. Recent methods have included support for color coding but still require that your code be copied into another utility. Recognizing the value of displaying richly formatted code we added this feature directly into the SRP Editor several years ago.

Therefore, the programmer only needs to select their code, right-click, and click on the ‘Copy as HTML Code’ menu item. Using this results in a block of HTML code that you can now paste into a document that supports HTML formatting, including many blog pages…
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Recently a customer reported that they were having trouble installing the SRP Set MinMaxInfo utility. Immediately I began to get suspicious and through a quick Q&A session discovered that the customer was attempting to install this from the three year old installer which is still available from our Downloads page. This served as a helpful reminder that our Downloads page is seriously outdated. Not only do we no longer support the original installer for the SRP Set MinMaxInfo utility, we no longer provide that as a stand-alone utility! Instead we have bundled it within our feature rich (but still free) SRP Utilities.

We realized that perhaps many OpenInsight developers might not be aware of this product. Although it was unveiled during one of our 2008 Revelation Users Conference presentations we never updated our website to make it available to the community at large. This was somewhat on purpose as it is customary for conference materials (or product in this case) to remain exclusive to conference attendees for a period of time in order to encourage more people to participate. It is now time to showcase the many tools that comprise the SRP Utilities package. To kick things off we will focus on some very useful Array functions.
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