Microsoft KB Archive/177238

= How To Hyperlink in UserDocuments =

Article ID: 177238

Article Last Modified on 7/1/2004

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Professional Edition
 * Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Edition
 * Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Enterprise Edition
 * Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition
 * Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Control Creation Edition
 * Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02
 * Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 128-Bit Edition

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This article was previously published under Q177238



SUMMARY
This article illustrates how to use the hyperlink object from a UserDocument (Visual Basic Active Document) to navigate to another document. It demonstrates the following:


 * 1) How to use the Hyperlink.NavigateTo.
 * 2) How to use Parent.LocationURL.
 * 3) How to construct an absolute URL.
 * 4) Why Parent.LocationName and App.Path are not suitable for this purpose.



MORE INFORMATION
From your UserDocument, you can jump to other UserDocuments that are in your application (Internal Jumping) or you can jump to other Web locations or documents (External Jumping). In both cases, you use the Hyperlink object's NavigateTo method and supply an absolute URL to where you want to jump. For example, you can do the following from your UserDocument code:

Hyperlink.NavigateTo "http://www.microsoft.com"

This will cause Internet Explorer to navigate to the specified location. You can also use this method for jumping to other UserDocuments in your application.

Because you have to specify an absolute URL, using this approach for other UserDocuments on a Web site requires extra work. You need to know the full URL from which the document (.vbd) was launched. You can get this information using Parent.LocationURL from your UserDocument code. The location can be either a Web URL or a UNC file location name.

NOTE: You should use the Parent.LocationURL property for retrieving the location of the UserDocument. Parent.LocationURL, unlike Parent.LocationName, works identically in both Internet Explorer 3 and Internet Explorer 4. In Internet Explorer 3, LocationName returns the complete path just as LocationURL does. In Internet Explorer 4, LocationName does not always return a complete path.

You should only use App.Path when the document is loaded from the local computer because it returns the location where your EXE or DLL exists locally, not the location from which the document was downloaded.

Constructing an Absolute URL
As mentioned before, you need an absolute URL for Hyperlink.NavigateTo method. This can be tricky for jumping to other UserDocuments in your application because the UserDocuments can reside on a local (or network) file share or on a Web server. The following function accepts the new URL in the form of a string. This URL can be either a relative or an absolute path. The function returns an absolute URL in the form of a string that can be passed to the NavigateTo function: Function PathFromURL(iURL As String) As String '  Function Name:  PathFromURL '  Pass in a single filename (iURL) and return the full path to that '  file. This works when you run on a local computer (for testing    '   purposes or running from IDE) or when running from a Web server. Dim navPath As String Dim intLocal As Integer '  Check if there is an absolute URL being passed in. '  If so, return that URL. If InStr(iURL, "://") Or InStr(iURL, ":\\") Then PathFromURL = iURL Else '  Find the last "/" intLocal = InStrRev(UserDocument.Parent.locationname, "/") If (intLocal = 0) Then '  If there is not a "/", we are running on the local computer. navPath = App.Path Else '  We are running on the Web server, use locationname to get '  the current path. navPath = Left(UserDocument.Parent.locationname, intLocal - 1) End If       '   Append the requested file name to the path for the '  absolute URL. PathFromURL = navPath & "/" & iURL End If   End Function As an example, suppose you have a Doc1.VBD and a Doc2.VBD stored on a server at http://demo/hyperlink, but you do not want to hardcode the server name in your code so that these VBD files can be moved easily from one server location to another. To jump from Doc1.vbd to Doc2.vbd, you can use the above function as follows: Hyperlink.NavigateTo PathFromURL("doc2.vbd") Because PathFromURL can work on both URLs and UNC, this technique will work in both cases without changing code.

Additional query words: LocationName LocationURL Hyperlink

Keywords: kbhowto KB177238

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