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Any task that involves interaction with the page(s) user
views in the current browser window (in the browser's work area)
must be implemented in the toolbar
script. From it you can access the currently viewed page
through the Browser
object which in turn gives you access to body of the document or
to the frames and their documents - whatever is currently opened
in the browser.
From the Browser object you can learn the current URL (Browser.LocationURL
property), access the document (Browser.Document property), see
if the page is a frameset (Browser.Document.frames collection)
and dig deeper in the DHTML object model. By using the Browser
object's methods you can force it to navigate to an URL of your
choice (Browser.Navigate2), set caption text, status bar text
and so on.
Also your toolbar script (or object if you implemented it in
VB, C for example) is informed about the events happening in the
browser through the event
handlers you implemented in it. you can react to them and
perform certain actions over the pages shown to the user,
prevent the user from navigation to certain URL or even perform
some actions instead of the browser.
The latter is an interesting sample - for instance assume you
want to handle the download of certain resources in special
manner. It could be documents in the intranet for example. Then
you can intercept OnBeforeNavigate
event, cancel the navigation and start a thread that downloads
the resource using the NetStreams
library (it is part of the ScriptBar's run-time library), then you can deal
further with the downloaded resource - pass it to a specific
program (Host.Execute
method) or save it in a predefined folder etc.
Therefore the toolbar can interfere with the work Internet
Explorer does, change the viewed pages, control the navigation,
perform tasks instead of the browser, collect information,
perform tasks needed to integrate the user actions in the
browser with other applications and so on.
If used together with Active Local
Pages (ALP) product the newObjects IE ScriptBar may give you
even more opportunities. For instance you can open in the
browser work area an ALP application that manages data collected
by the toolbar, configures it or does something else that is
needed from time to time and is backed by data collected/managed
by the toolbar during the regular usage of the browser. Combined
with the ability to dig into the DHTML object model of the WEB
pages user views this may present an interesting opportunity for
complex browsing companion applications.
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