Zeta HTML Edit Control

• Download binaries - 300 KB
• Download source files - 500 KB
• Project on GitHub

Introduction 

This article presents you a small wrapper class around the Windows Forms 2.0 WebBrowser control.

Features

The wrapper is no rocket science but provides some features I struggled with in the past. We use the control in several of our own (internal and external) applications, e.g. our Test Management tool. 

Some of the features include:

• Enable the setting of text even when the control is not yet fully initialized
• Allow pasting of images from the clipboard
• Allows for resizing the images within the editor with the mouse 
• Provide an alternative context menu for applying formatting options
• Optionally directly edit the underlying HTML source code
• Translated resources in English and German
• Interface IExternalInformationProvider for externally persisting and restoring settings
• Provide standard CSS in the control; usually you do not need to define your own CSS

Using the Code

To include the code in your own project, simply include the "ZetaHtmlEditControl.dll" assembly into your project.

Add the assembly to your Visual Studio .NET 2008 Windows Forms Designer Toolbox if you want to be able to drag the ExtendedWebBrowser control to your forms. Alternatively create and initialize an instance of the ExtendedWebBrowser control by code.

Setting HTML

To put HTML from your code into the control, assign the HTML code to the ExtendedWebBrowser.DocumentText property. You do not have to pass a complete HTML document with HEAD and BODY tags but only the actual content that you would write inside the BODY tag.

Getting the HTML 

To read out the HTML from the control, call the ExtendedWebBrowser.GetDocumentText(string folderPath) method. The method takes one parameter "folderPath" that tells the control where to store newly passed images from the clipboard. 

Summary

This article quickly introduced a wrapper around the Windows Forms 2.0 WebBrowser control that adds some extra functions to make it more usable in a real-world-application. Feel free to copy, modify or extend the control to match your own requirements.

To ask questions, suggest features or provide other comments, please use the comments section at the bottom of this article.

History

• 2013-07-09 - You now also find the project on GitHub
• 2013-05-20 - Images inside the edit control can now be resized proportionally to make them smaller. When persisting the images, they are actually resized on disk, too.
• 2011-06-02 - Added support for inserting and editing tables. Added new user control that has a toolbar (see screenshot) that you can switch on and off from code.
• 2011-03-16 - Updated for and tested with the latest Internet Explorer 9 (RTM). If you do experience AccessViolation exceptions when working with this control, please read this MSDN blog posting that suggests to add a custom build step
  "$(DevEnvDir)..\tools\vsvars32.bat"
editbin.exe /NXCOMPAT:NO "$(TargetPath)"
• 2011-02-26 - Update to (hopefully) make the control work with Internet Explorer 9 RC work again. See this Stack Overflow posting for details. I've included a mini web server with the control to serve the texts from this server, instead of setting it directly. It should be 100% transparent to the user of the code.
• 2009-11-18 - First public release to CodeProject.com