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C# WebBrowser control -- Get Document Elements After AJAX?

Asked 2009-03-11T19:14:55.487
20

I'm writing an application that uses the WebBrowser control to view web content that can change with AJAX that adds new content/elements. I can't seem to get at the new elements any way I've tried. BrowserCtl.DocumentText doesn't have the up-to-date page and of course it's not in "view source" either.

Is there some way to get this new data using this control? :( Please help. Thanks!

IE:

Browser.Navigate("www.somewebpagewithAJAX.com");
//Code that waits for browser to finish...
...
//WebBrowser control has loaded content and AJAX has loaded new content
// (is visible at runtime on form) but can't see them in Browser.Document.All
// or Browser.DocumentText :(
c# javascript ajax browser
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2 Answers

3

You will need to use DOM for it. Cast WebBrowser.Document.DomDocument to IHTMLDocument?. You will have to import some COM interfaces or Microsoft.mshtml assembly.

Have a look to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752641(VS.85).aspx for more details.

answered 2009-03-27T21:25:37.087
2

I assume that since you're reading content which is generated from Ajax requests that you require the user to progress the application to a point where the relevant data is loaded, at which point you run code to read the data.

If that's not the case, you'll need to automate this process, generating the click events which build out the DOM nodes you're interested in reading. I do this somewhat commonly with the WebBrowser control and tend to write that layer of functionality in Javascript and call it with .InvokeScript(). Another route would be to find the nodes which fire the Ajax functionality from C# and manually trigger their click events:

HtmlElement content = webMain.Document.GetElementById("content");
content.RaiseEvent("onclick");

An important aspect to note in the script above is the fact that you can interact with DOM nodes naively in C# if you accept and work around the limitations of the HtmlElement object type.

answered 2009-03-29T23:21:47.070

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