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ScotScot 

Office Toolkit with Netscape???

I have an scontrol built with vbscript and the Office Toolkit. As I expected, it works fine with IE, but not with Netscape or Firefox.

I'd like to convert it to javascript to allow it to work from Netscape and Firefox.
However, I cannot find a way to make the Toolkit (since it's a DLL) work within Netscape.

Has anyone found a way to use the Toolkit with Netscape and Firefox?

Scot

darozdaroz
Going out on a limb...

I've been looking at ways to move my proxy server salesforce solution to the browser. One of the thigns I was looking at was a Firefox plugin. (Seeing as we use that for everything but salesforce right now). Take a look through the mozilla developer site, something about XPCOM in Mozilla. I remember seeing a lot of refrences to MS COM objects in the documentation, but I only skimmed it every so briefly (Google search).
ScotScot

Thanks, I'll look for that.

I had researched Netscape/Mozilla and found indications that COM objects could be accessed, but the deliberately turned it off. There was a way around this by specifying an exception. Netscape used this exception to allow one of the video plug-ins (real player?) to work. I tried to find out more and to customize my Netscape, but failed to get anything to work.

Unfortunately, of course, even if I did suceed at this, I'd have the problem of customizing my users' versions of Netscape.

I figured I'd spend more time researching solutions if someone else had proved that it was possible...

 

darozdaroz
(Shoulda asked this the first time)

Why not go straight to the SOAP API via JavaScript?

PITA - yes. But portable and can be packaged as a browser extension for Firefox, or Mozilla... (Yes, this is on my 'todo' list... right above take a vacation)

(Edit)

Per Adam's post: http://forums.sforce.com/sforce/board/message?board.id=general_development&message.id=3455

I took a look at what they're doing and think it could be quite interesting... don't have the time, tho, to wrap my head around it fully....

Message Edited by daroz on 03-22-2005 12:22 PM

Message Edited by daroz on 03-22-2005 12:22 PM

ScotScot

Good point. My three reasons for (trying to) use the toolkit rather than MSXML and SOAP are:

   1)  I've already got it written with the toolkit
   2)  I know the toolkit 
   3)  The PITA that you mentioned

If I cannot find a way to use the toolkit with the other browsers, I'll need to choose between either of:

   a) Building my own Web site to host the processing, or
   b) Switching to the raw SOAP and MSXML.

I'm still hoping for an easy life ....

Scot

darozdaroz


Scot wrote:

I'm still hoping for an easy life ....

Scot






I gave up on that pipe dream back in October

I understand exactly where you're comming from. Even more to my point I'm trying to find something that I don't have to deploy network-wide (my proxy server), but still managet to support all the browsers we use... (Firefox)

Our bigger dilemma is uptime and system availability... If I have to host the processing I have added another point of failure in our application. While Salesforce is about 98%-99% uptime the combination of the two would surely be less. (I'm good, just not five-9's good, and who wants to lay out that kind of cash for this?) So that rules out the web site hosting -- so we're stuck in the browser.

I have looked through a few sites and the MS XMLHTTP and the Mozilla XmlHttpTransport objects look fairly interchangeable (difference in constructor logic). That may be what we'll be doing for some of our stuff in a few months...

But first, I have to play with writing a Mozilla/Firefox plugin to alter the HTML of the SF site to change the links for add/edit of csome objects to point to our controls, instead of theirs. (Think invoices, for example -- Imagine a related list of invoices where you can click on add/edit and go stright to your control... it's SO nice in the office behind the proxy but outside... it sux)

Once that's done (if ever) I can look at the rest.
adamgadamg
Yes, a JS abstraction would be very interesting - one could load a different JS based on the browser but keep the APIs the same.

...do I need to offer a free dreamforce pass to the first person to do this? (and cross platform?)