Microsoft Windows Architecture for Developers Training Kit

Using ActiveX Documents in Internet Applications

Using ActiveX documents, you can develop applications that integrate tightly with other elements of your Internet or intranet site. You can integrate these components to allow users to navigate transparently between HTML pages and ActiveX documents.

Applications for the Internet

In a sense, ActiveX documents are Visual Basic applications for the Internet. Nearly anything you currently do with standard applications can be done with ActiveX documents.

Much like the elements of an HTML page, ActiveX documents that are not installed on users' computers can be automatically downloaded when users navigate to them. Furthermore, they can be upgraded automatically if the versions available on the server are more recent.

Several features come together to enable you to provide installation, navigation, and persistence with your ActiveX documents:

• Automatically download components over the Internet

  You can create a link to your ActiveX document that causes the browser to automatically find and download all components needed to run the component.

• Hyperlink objects

  In a hyperlink-aware container, you can use the properties and methods of Visual Basic's Hyperlink object to jump to a given URL or navigate through the history list.

• Merge menus

  As with documents that are made available through Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, the menus of Visual Basic ActiveX documents can be merged with the browser's menus. As the document is loaded in Internet Explorer, for instance, the browser's menu items will be merged with those you created to accompany your ActiveX document.

• The PropertyBag object

  When you deploy an ActiveX document in Internet Explorer, you can store data through the PropertyBag object.