Web browser control overview

The Web browser control allows you to embed a standard web browser in a mimic to render web content. Show picture

The Web browser control is implemented using the Microsoft's Edge WebView2 redistributable component which allows displaying web content in your application using the same rendering engine as the Microsoft Edge web browser. In addition to displaying web content, Edge WebView2, and hence the Web browser control, can also display files in Pdf format.

A predefined animation is available to dynamically control a Web browser instance without scripting, see the topic Web browser control commands for more information.

Installing the Edge WebView2 component

If Edge WebView2 is not pre-installed on the host platform, it must be installed for the Web browser control to work. If necessary, Edge WebView2 will be installed if you select Web browser control during the installation of PcVue. In all cases, it can be found as a feature when performing a custom installation. Show picture

Differences between a typical web browser and the Web browser control

The main difference between a typical web browser and the Web browser control is that there is no navigation bar. This means that the contents is strictly controlled by the application, as are the browser settings.

The Web browser control supports a limited set of the Microsoft Edge shortcut keys. See the topic Using the Web browser control at run-time for details.

Cache and user data

The Web browser control stores data, such as cookies, permissions, and cached resources in the Etc\EBWebView folder which is located in the PcVue installation root. This folder can be quite large, up to 200 Mb, and you must ensure the host computer has sufficient storage space available.

SCADA Basic

The instruction WEBBROWSER can be used in a SCADA Basic script to control the behavior of an instance of the Web browser control.