On 15/03/2011 20:35, Robert Hanson wrote:
Hi, Michael. It's been to long for me to remember what the problems
were in direct communication with the browser window from VB.
Hello Bob and others,
here is a a progress report on 2 way direct communication.
First a reminder that I'm programming in Visual Basic (VB), which can
set up a WebBrowser within a Form (Window).You can then tell the
WebBrowser to navigate to a specific URL or file (which may load an
Applet). Note that you can place several of these WebBrowsers on the
same Form.
Second reminder: my total number of lines of programmed script of any
color is zero.
I use the WebBrowser and other elements as a black box, learning enough
for the basic input output.
So Bob helped me set up a way to send commands to the Applet:
VB - WebBrowser - Jmol Applet
He initially suggested it should be possible to send commands directly
(Exec..), but we had immediate success by writing a text file to disk,
and a new supplementary script to recover the command.
This file method works.For example I can loop through the entire protein
sequence (in VB code), select a color for each AA, and send one big
string to Jmol, which cheerfully colors the protein.
This does have disadvantages in speed.You need to program a delay. If a
user selects the "sequence position" parameter box, and holds their
finger on the keyboard, it will either be too fast (error) or too slow
and certain commands will be skipped.
So I took another look at sending commands directly, and was greatly
disappointed at the documentation.From the Forums I saw various formats
for such commands.Attempting to follow such fragments of examples led to
a lot of errors:
91 = Object Variable or with block variable not set
438 = object does not support this property or method
So much for guessing the command format.
Apparently you use WebBrowser1.Document.xxx( ).yyytype commands to read
and write to specific elements of the web page.The problem is you need
to know the index or id of the elements.
There was finally a ray of hope using
WebBrowser1.Document.activeElement.Value
I would first click on the element to activate it, and then I could read
the contents.
I tried to recover its name with WebBrowser1.Document.activeElement.tagName
Reminder of the page lay-out: within the WebBrowser, there is the
Molecule, just below is an "upper text line" followed by the "Execute"
button, and then a "lower text line" (where my VB commands show up via
files).
All 3 of these elements (the 2 text lines and the Execute button) have
the same tagName of INPUT.
So attempting to write to INPUT just gave more errors.
I then tried to obtain more information using the index method (i is an
integer index value).
WebBrowser1.Document.All(i).tagNAme
WebBrowser1.Document.All(i).ID
WebBrowser1.Document.All(i).Value
This seems to give unique values, although many elements have no ID.
For my set up in VB6, I see
_index tagNameid_
0HTML
1 HEAD
2 TITLE
3 SCRIPT jmolcmd
4 SCRIPT
5 SCRIPT
6 BODY
7 SCRIPT
8 OBJECT jmolApplet0
9 BR
10 SPAN span_jmolCmd0
11 INPUT jmolCmd0
12 INPUT
13 BR
14 INPUT msg
15(error)
So, for example, I can send commands with:
WebBrowser1.Document.All(11).Value = "select9 ; wireframe 80 ; color
yellow ; spacefill 300"
WebBrowser1.Document.All(12).Click
This seems good so far, but there are some obvious questions.
1)Are the names and numbers (index) subject to change in future versions
of Jmol ?
2)Is this the best way to go ?
3)What name or index are to be used to obtain state information? For
turning the spin on and off, it would help to know its current state.
In conclusion, these first results are encouraging, but it was done
somewhat blindly.
To be continued.
Michael Marden
INSERM U779
Hopital de Bicetre / Bat. Broca, Niveau 3
University Paris 11
78 rue du General Leclerc
94275 Le Kremlin-Bicetre / France
Tel: (Int. code + 33 1) 49 59 56 63 Fax: -61
E-mail: michael.mar...@inserm.fr
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