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MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync - JavaScript UWP app printing

2017 Oct 11, 5:49

The documentation for printing in JavaScript UWP apps is out of date as it all references MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource but that method has been replaced by MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync since WinPhone 8.1.

Background

Previous to WinPhone 8.1 the WebView's HTML content ran on the UI thread of the app. This is troublesome for rendering arbitrary web content since in the extreme case the JavaScript of some arbitrary web page might just sit in a loop and never return control to your app's UI. With WinPhone 8.1 we added off thread WebView in which the WebView runs HTML content on a separate UI thread.

Off thread WebView required changing our MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource API which could no longer synchronously produce an HtmlPrintDocumentSource. With WebViews running on their own threads it may take some time for them to generate their print content for the HtmlPrintDocumentSource and we don't want to hang the app's UI thread in the interim. So the MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource API was replaced with MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync which returns a promise the resolved value of which is the eventual HtmlPrintDocumentSource.

Sample

However, the usage of the API is otherwise unchanged. So in sample code you see referencing MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource the sample code is still reasonable but you need to call MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync instead and wait for the promise to complete. For example the PrintManager docs has an example implementing a PrintTaskRequested event handler in a JavaScript UWP app.

    function onPrintTaskRequested(printEvent) {    
var printTask = printEvent.request.createPrintTask("Print Sample", function (args) {
args.setSource(MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource(document));
});

Instead we need to obtain a deferral in the event handler so we can asynchronously wait for getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync to complete:

    function onPrintTaskRequested(printEvent) {    
var printTask = printEvent.request.createPrintTask("Print Sample", function (args) {
const deferral = args.getDeferral();
MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync(document).then(htmlPrintDocumentSource => {
args.setSource(htmlPrintDocumentSource);
deferral.complete();
}, error => {
console.error("Error: " + error.message + " " + error.stack);
deferral.complete();
});
});
PermalinkCommentsjavascript MSApp printing programming uwp webview win10 windows

Application Content URI Rule effects

2017 Jun 30, 3:01

Previously I described Application Content URI Rules (ACUR) parsing and ACUR ordering. This post describes what you get from putting a URI in ACUR.

URIs in the ACUR gain the following which is otherwise unavailable:

  • Geoloc API usage
  • Audio and video capture API usage
  • Pointer lock API usage
  • Web notifications API usage
  • IndexedDB API usage
  • Clipboard API usage
  • window.external.notify access from within webview
  • window.close the primary window
  • Top level navigation in the primary window
  • Cross origin XHR and fetch to ms-appx(-web) scheme URIs
  • Cross origin dirtied canvas read access if dirtied by ms-appx(-web) scheme URIs
  • Cross origin text track for video element for tracks from ms-appx(-web) scheme URIs

URIs in the ACUR that also have full WinRT access additionally gain the following:

  • Cross origin XHR and fetch
  • Cross origin dirtied canvas read access
  • Cross origin text track for video element
  • Local audio and video WinRT plugins work with media elements
PermalinkCommentsapplication-content-uri-rules coding javascript programming windows-store

Application Content URI Rules rule ordering

2017 Jun 1, 1:30

Application Content URI Rules (ACUR from now on) defines the bounds on the web that make up a Microsoft Store application. The previous blog post discussed the syntax of the Rule's Match attribute and this time I'll write about the interactions between the Rules elements.

Order

A single ApplicationContentUriRules element may have up to 100 Rule child elements. When determining if a navigation URI matches any of the ACUR the last Rule in the list with a matching match wildcard URI is used. If that Rule is an include rule then the navigation URI is determined to be an application content URI and if that Rule is an exclude rule then the navigation rule is not an application content URI. For example:

Rule Type='include' Match='https://example.com/'/
Rule Type='exclude' Match='https://example.com/'/

Given the above two rules in that order, the navigation URI https://example.com/ is not an application content URI because the last matching rule is the exclude rule. Reverse the order of the rules and get the opposite result.

WindowsRuntimeAccess

In addition to determining if a navigation URI is application content or not, a Rule may also confer varying levels of WinRT access via the optional WindowsRuntimeAccess attribute which may be set to 'none', 'allowForWeb', or 'all'. If a navigation URI matches multiple different include rules only the last rule is applied even as it applies to the WindowsRuntimeAccess attribute. For example:

Rule Type='include' Match='https://example.com/' WindowsRuntimeAccess='none'/
Rule Type='include' Match='https://example.com/' WindowsRuntimeAccess='all'/

Given the above two rules in that order, the navigation URI https://example.com/ will have access to all WinRT APIs because the last matching rule wins. Reverse the rule order and the navigation URI https://example.com/ will have no access to WinRT. There is no summation or combining of multiple matching rules - only the last matching rule wins.

PermalinkCommentsapplication-content-uri-rules programming uri windows windows-store

Application Content URI Rules wildcard syntax

2017 May 31, 4:48

Application Content URI Rules (ACUR from now on) defines the bounds of the web that make up the Microsoft Store application. Package content via the ms-appx URI scheme is automatically considered part of the app. But if you have content on the web via http or https you can use ACUR to declare to Windows that those URIs are also part of your application. When your app navigates to URIs on the web those URIs will be matched against the ACUR to determine if they are part of your app or not. The documentation for how matching is done on the wildcard URIs in the ACUR Rule elements is not very helpful on MSDN so here are some notes.

Rules

You can have up to 100 Rule XML elements per ApplicationContentUriRules element. Each has a Match attribute that can be up to 2084 characters long. The content of the Match attribute is parsed with CreateUri and when matching against URIs on the web additional wildcard processing is performed. I’ll call the URI from the ACUR Rule the rule URI and the URI we compare it to found during app navigation the navigation URI.

The rule URI is matched to a navigation URI by URI component: scheme, username, password, host, port, path, query, and fragment. If a component does not exist on the rule URI then it matches any value of that component in the navigation URI. For example, a rule URI with no fragment will match a navigation URI with no fragment, with an empty string fragment, or a fragment with any value in it.

Asterisk

Each component except the port may have up to 8 asterisks. Two asterisks in a row counts as an escape and will match 1 literal asterisk. For scheme, username, password, query and fragment the asterisk matches whatever it can within the component.

Host

For the host, if the host consists of exactly one single asterisk then it matches anything. Otherwise an asterisk in a host only matches within its domain name label. For example, http://*.example.com will match http://a.example.com/ but not http://b.a.example.com/ or http://example.com/. And http://*/ will match http://example.com, http://a.example.com/, and http://b.a.example.com/. However the Store places restrictions on submitting apps that use the http://* rule or rules with an asterisk in the second effective domain name label. For example, http://*.com is also restricted for Store submission.

Path

For the path, an asterisk matches within the path segment. For example, http://example.com/a/*/c will match http://example.com/a/b/c and http://example.com/a//c but not http://example.com/a/b/b/c or http://example.com/a/c

Additionally for the path, if the path ends with a slash then it matches any path that starts with that same path. For example, http://example.com/a/ will match http://example.com/a/b and http://example.com/a/b/c/d/e/, but not http://example.com/b/.

If the path doesn’t end with a slash then there is no suffix matching performed. For example, http://example.com/a will match only http://example.com/a and no URIs with a different path.

As a part of parsing the rule URI and the navigation URI, CreateUri will perform URI normalization and so the hostname and scheme will be made lower case (casing matters in all other parts of the URI and case sensitive comparisons will be performed), IDN normalization will be performed, ‘.’ and ‘..’ path segments will be resolved and other normalizations as described in the CreateUri documentation.

PermalinkCommentsapplication-content-uri-rules programming windows windows-store

Parsing WinMD with .NET reflection APIs

2016 Nov 2, 6:13

Parsing WinMD files, the containers of WinRT API metadata, is relatively simple using the appropriate .NET reflection APIs. However, figuring out which reflection APIs to use is not obvious. I've got a completed C sharp class parsing WinMD files that you can check out for reference.

Use System.Reflection.Assembly.ReflectionOnlyLoad to load the WinMD file. Don't use the normal load methods because the WinMD files contain only metadata. This will load up info about APIs defined in that WinMD, but any references to types outside of that WinMD including types found in the normal OS system WinMD files must be resolved by the app code via the System.Reflection.InteropServices.WindowsRuntimeMetadata.ReflectionOnlyNamespaceResolve event.

In this event handler you must resolve the unknown namespace reference by adding an assembly to the NamespaceResolveEventArgs's ResolvedAssemblies property. If you're only interested in OS system WinMD files you can use System.Reflection.InteropServices.WindowsRuntimeMetadata.ResolveNamespace to turn a namespace into the expected OS system WinMD path and turn that path into an assembly with ReflectionOnlyLoad.

PermalinkComments.net code programming winmd winrt

Tweet from David Risney

2016 Jun 2, 4:40
Answering the important questions: Tab v Spaces https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/  Broken down by programming language & using GitHub as population
PermalinkComments

Tweet from David Risney

2016 Apr 8, 4:52
@_lance_leonard @ericlaw First thought was confusion as to why Logo was getting used in production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) 
PermalinkComments

Retweet of anildash

2016 Jan 3, 9:59
Oh! @jsnell is way ahead of me: https://sixcolors.com/post/2015/12/the-best-christmas-gift-in/ … Programming BB-8 with a kid-friendly app! Thanks to @anoopr for the link.
PermalinkComments

Retweet of igrigorik

2015 Apr 12, 7:15
hard won programming wisdom, courtesy of @rob_pike... pic.twitter.com/OmbCi8YR6P
PermalinkComments

Retweet of benchirlin

2015 Mar 1, 8:56
RE: anti @WordPress "There are 2 types of programming languages: the ones ppl complain about and the ones nobody uses." -Bjarne Stroustrop
PermalinkComments

Image Manipulation in PowerShell - Windows PowerShell Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

2015 Jan 5, 1:20

Great blog post and set of powershell scripts for manipulating images.

PermalinkCommentsprogramming coding powershell

Image Manipulation in PowerShell - Windows PowerShell Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

2015 Jan 5, 1:20

Great blog post and set of powershell scripts for manipulating images.

PermalinkCommentsprogramming coding powershell

Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR,...

2014 Oct 6, 2:45


Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript and Three.js

“I built a live-coding web app for the Oculus Rift where you code in JavaScript using Three.js and watch the world change around you in real-time.”

PermalinkCommentsvideo programming javascript 3d vr oculus-rift technical

Untrusted - a user javascript adventure game

2014 Apr 8, 6:53

The game is to figure out what constrained modifications you must make to beat the game.

PermalinkCommentstechnical programming javascript game

Debugging LoadLibrary Failures - Junfeng Zhang's Windows Programming Notes - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

2014 Feb 25, 2:22

How to turn on debug logging for LoadLibrary to diagnose failures. For example, see where in the dependency graph of a DLL LoadLibrary ran into issues.

PermalinkCommentstechnical win32 windows debugging loadlibrary

Results of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition

2014 Jan 28, 4:58

tgceec:

After much deliberation, the winners of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition are finally selected. There are two different award categories. The winners of the first category are those submissions that produced the largest error with the smallest amount of source code. These entries contain a…

PermalinkCommentshumor technical c++ programming coding

Moving PowerShell data into Excel

2013 Aug 15, 10:04
PowerShell nicely includes ConvertTo-CSV and ConvertFrom-CSV which allow you to serialize and deserialize your PowerShell objects to and from CSV. Unfortunately the CSV produced by ConvertTo-CSV is not easily opened by Excel which expects by default different sets of delimiters and such. Looking online you'll find folks who recommend using automation via COM to create a new Excel instance and copy over the data in that fashion. This turns out to be very slow and impractical if you have large sets of data. However you can use automation to open CSV files with not the default set of delimiters. So the following isn't the best but it gets Excel to open a CSV file produced via ConvertTo-CSV and is faster than the other options:
Param([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$Path);

$excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application

$xlWindows=2
$xlDelimited=1 # 1 = delimited, 2 = fixed width
$xlTextQualifierDoubleQuote=1 # 1= doublt quote, -4142 = no delim, 2 = single quote
$consequitiveDelim = $False;
$tabDelim = $False;
$semicolonDelim = $False;
$commaDelim = $True;
$StartRow=1
$Semicolon=$True

$excel.visible=$true
$excel.workbooks.OpenText($Path,$xlWindows,$StartRow,$xlDelimited,$xlTextQualifierDoubleQuote,$consequitiveDelim,$tabDelim,$semicolonDelim, $commaDelim);
See Workbooks.OpenText documentation for more information.
PermalinkCommentscsv excel powershell programming technical

Considerate MessagePort Usage

2013 Aug 7, 7:14
Sharing by leezie5. Two squirrels sharing food hanging from a bird feeder. Used under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.When writing a JavaScript library that uses postMessage and the message event, I must be considerate of other JS code that will be running along side my library. I shouldn't assume I'm the only sender and receiver on a caller provided MessagePort object. This means obviously I should use addEventListener("message" rather than the onmessage property (see related What if two programs did this?). But considering the actual messages traveling over the message channel I have the issue of accidentally processing another libraries messages and having another library accidentally process my own message. I have a few options for playing nice in this regard:
Require a caller provided unique MessagePort
This solves the problem but puts a lot of work on the caller who may not notice nor follow this requirement.
Uniquely mark my messages
To ensure I'm acting upon my own messages and not messages that happen to have similar properties as my own, I place a 'type' property on my postMessage data with a value of a URN unique to me and my JS library. Usually because its easy I use a UUID URN. There's no way someone will coincidentally produce this same URN. With this I can be sure I'm not processing someone else's messages. Of course there's no way to modify my postMessage data to prevent another library from accidentally processing my messages as their own. I can only hope they take similar steps as this and see that my messages are not their own.
Use caller provided MessagePort only to upgrade to new unique MessagePort
I can also make my own unique MessagePort for which only my library will have the end points. This does still require the caller to provide an initial message channel over which I can communicate my new unique MessagePort which means I still have the problems above. However it clearly reduces the surface area of the problem since I only need once message to communicate the new MessagePort.
The best solution is likely all of the above.
Photo is Sharing by leezie5. Two squirrels sharing food hanging from a bird feeder. Used under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.
PermalinkCommentsDOM html javascript messagechannel postMessage programming technical

C++ constructor member initializers run in member declaration order

2013 Jul 18, 3:29PermalinkCommentsc++ development programming technical

Zelda Starring Zelda (by Kenna W) Original NES Legend of Zelda...

2013 Mar 18, 2:17


Zelda Starring Zelda (by Kenna W)

Original NES Legend of Zelda ROM modified to swap Zelda and Link: play as Zelda saving Link.

PermalinkCommentsNintendo rom hack programming Zelda legend-of-zelda
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