An explanation of windows resource templates.
| Submitted On | 2008-05-09 22:52:38 |
| By | Thomas Swift |
| Level | Intermediate |
| User Rating | 5.0 (15 globes from 3 users) |
| Compatibility | VB 6.0 |
| Category | String Manipulation |
| World | Visual Basic |
| Archive File | VB6_Embedd2112375102008.zip |
|
||
| First off their are a lot of
ways you can pull off a image presentation from the depths of source code.
The hardest way is to do it programicly considering how hard it is to binary
decode files. Especially gif's. When you look at a directory thru windows
file explorer all your doing is viewing it thru a template driven and
scripted web browser control. In fact even your desktop is a heavily
scripted web browser control believe it or not. If you don't believe me
just point eather the VB web browser control or a sub classed copy of
internet explorer at a file directory and you will find out what I mean.
Even the explorer right click menu comes into view on right click and you
can have iconic view.
A closer look at the file that houses the Microsoft Picture viewer using Resource Hacker and behold what do you find but a HTML template with insert code here variables all over the place. They pulled the same thing off in their Web Photo Album Generator on the Windows 98 CD. In fact if you look closely at a lot of the Windows operating system you will find embedded templates being used all over the place. Some like the Web Photo Album Generator even use embedded cascading style sheets or CSS for short. Well I promised to teach you just how they are pulling this off. Well in the VB6 GUI you have the VB Resource Editor on your toolbar. In the resource editor you have 5 types of resources you can add to an embedded resource file. The one furthest to the right is Custom. Using the custom resource type you can add literally anything to your project. Once you have chosen and added your particular resource it assigns each one an index number. Numbers 101, 102, 103 on to infinity. This is how you store your HTML templates in your final program. Now that you know how to store a template you need to know how to get it out and view it. Well lets look at some simple code to extract a custom string resource and view it. <textarea rows="24" cols="78" name="Code">Input: LoadQuickFeed 101, "http://www.sfgate.com/rss/feeds/bondage.xml" Public Function LoadQuickFeed(DataIndex As Integer, FeedURL As String) Dim myArray As String Dim TheFile As Integer WebBrowser1.Visible = True myArray = ByteArrayToString(LoadResData(DataIndex, "CUSTOM")) myArray = Replace(myArray, "<<--URL-HERE-->>", FeedURL) TheFile = FreeFile() Open App.Path & "\temp.htm" For Output As #TheFile Print #TheFile, myArray Close #TheFile WebBrowser1.Navigate2 App.Path & "\temp.htm" End Function Private Function ByteArrayToString(bytArray() As Byte) As String Dim sAns As String Dim iPos As String sAns = StrConv(bytArray, vbUnicode) iPos = InStr(sAns, Chr(0)) If iPos > 0 Then sAns = Left(sAns, iPos - 1) ByteArrayToString = sAns End Function </textarea> In the code above I have a previously
coded template embedded in my project as resource 101 written in Java
Script AJAX to display the RSS feed URL passed in the FeedURL variable.
The template has the <<--URL-HERE-->>
written in the place of the feed URL in it. I did that by
editing the HTML file with a text editor like Note Tab Pro after creating
it in Front Page and the Windows Scripting Editor. Well now that you know the secret the variables are should we say the sky is the limit ! Have fun expanding on this basic shell concept created by Microsoft eons ago ! Enjoy !!! The accompanying download contains same tutorial, but includes the HTML template source example as well. |