WebBrowser: Preventing Display of Print Dialog

[John Fritch]

Running IE 5.0 and VB 6.0 SP4 on Windows 95, the following command does what it is supposed to: print the WebBrowser document without displaying the Print Dialog.

brwWebBrowser.ExecWB OLECMDID_PRINT, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, "", ""

However, the document that appears to be Microsoft’s definitive statement on printing from the WebBrowser control, “Printing with the Internet Explorer WebBrowser Control” at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/wb_print.asp, states that the OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER parameter is ignored by IE 5.0. That obviously is not my experience.

Have any of you seen an environment in which OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER is ignored, i.e., the Print Dialog is displayed despite specification of this option?

John Fritch

Did you try this?

brwWebBrowser.ExecWB OLECMDID_PRINT, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER

Rather than what you had:

brwWebBrowser.ExecWB OLECMDID_PRINT, OLECMDEXECOPT_DONTPROMPTUSER, "", ""

[John Fritch]

The code I cited, including the two terminal "" values, was copied from Microsoft documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/c.../wb_print.asp. It works as it is supposed to on my machine.

My concern is that Microsoft documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/wb_print.asp suggests that there are environments in which this code will not work (i.e., will display the Print Dialog before printing). Is that really true?

John Fritch