Use Firefox's Javascript w/o the browser?

[rsilvergun]

Hi all, I'm trying to use Firefox to as an html renderer for reports. All I really want it to do is display a print dialog so I can select the printer I want to print to, and then print the HTML. I can make IE do this with perl and OLE, but IE's print engine kinda sucks (and blows, at the same time). Anyone know if this is even vaguely feasible? I though maybe I could get away with just making the 'window' invisible, small or at least closing the darn thing from a script after I'm done printing. I haven't found a way to make it not show, or be so small as to be unnoticable, and closing the window doesn't work reliable with tabs :(. It'd make a great report printer for my scripting needs if I could just get it to integrate nicely.

Oh, here's the perl code to make IE do what I want it to do, in case anyone can use it. For me, IE's too tempermental...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings 'all';
 
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Internet Controls';
use Win32::OLE::Variant;
 
# From Vc7/PlatformSDK/Include/MsHtmHst.h :
use constant PRINT_DONTBOTHERUSER    => 0x01;
use constant PRINT_WAITFORCOMPLETION => 0x02;
 
my $file = "C:\\FixReportBase\\realtest\\pg_0001.htm";
my $do_not_prompt = 0;
 
my $nCmdID      = OLECMDID_PRINT;
my $nCmdExecOpt = OLECMDEXECOPT_PROMPTUSER;
my $pvaIn       = PRINT_WAITFORCOMPLETION;
my $pvaOut      = 0;
 
if ($do_not_prompt) {
  $nCmdExecOpt  = OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER;
  $pvaIn       |= PRINT_DONTBOTHERUSER;
}
 
my $IE = Win32::OLE->new('InternetExplorer.Application') or die;
#$IE->{'Visible'} = 1;
$IE->Navigate( $file );
sleep 1 while $IE->{Busy};
 
$IE->ExecWB($nCmdID, $nCmdExecOpt, Variant(VT_I2,$pvaIn), $pvaOut);
 
$IE->Quit();

[acoder]

Welcome to TSDN!

I'm sorry I don't think this is possible using standard Javascript. You can only do this kind of stuff in IE using JScript/ActiveX. Firefox is too safe for that!

[rsilvergun]

Figures, I guess I should be glad though since I browse with Firefox :). I'm looking into other ways of doing what I want to do. In the meantime I've wimped out. I printed my HTML to postscript using a postscript printer redirected to a file printer, and I'm using that as a makeshift template for my reports. I still like the idea of generating HTML reports I can print from my script using Firefox. There's XPCOM, which looks like Gecko's take on COM, but it may be beyond my current abilities and time constraints (I just started a new job, and don't have as much time to play with this sort of stuff as I used to). If I can figure out a way to do it, I'll post it to sourceforge.net, wish me luck :).

[acoder]

Good luck. I don't have much experience in this kind of stuff. Hopefully, someone can help you or you manage to figure something out yourself.