Monday, April 25, 2005

Installing an Internet Explorer ActiveX Control Part II

In part I of this article, I expressed concern over the various methods of installing an ActiveX control normally distributed and/or updated in a CAB file via Internet Explorer. This follow-up post addresses some concerns of a commenter to that last post, and describes what my solution was.

The comment made by Troy was from the perspective of a repackaging solution. Troy is quite correct - using pre and post installation snapshots will grab the changes to the ModuleUsage subkey. However, this solution fails to achieve the other goals for this particular installation. We still have the issue of a later update coupled with the MSI repair (or self-repair) operation. A point I failed to mention but Troy unintentionally reminded me of is compatibility across versions of IE. With the type of software this is, it may have a shelf life that would include IE7. Are the changes made to the system under IE6 applicable to all versions of IE under all OS's? I don't know. Using the API to install the control alleviates most (but not all) of the potential future incompatibility concerns.

I especially like how he disliked option #3 - changing the IE security settings to assure a successful installation, calling the API, and resetting them. I laughed as I wrote this option, as I could not imagine anyone doing this. In the middle of last week, I came across the "Get In the Zone" section of an issue of "Web Team Talking." They actually suggest and provide code for doing just that - although in a different context for a slightly different reason. I happen to agree with the KISS directive - "Keep it Simple, Stupid" - but sometimes to assure a successful operation you need to handle the corner cases.

The last part of his comment - "[this is] why many enterprise customers choose to repackage installations from ISVs" is a completely different blog post. I cannot tell you how true this statement is - and it is usually caused by setup developers, either intentionally or unintentionally. I'll add this one to the list of future topics for sure.

For the sake of discussion we were using the Crystal Reports Web Viewer which can generically be replaced with any properly signed cab file that works in the normal deployment mechanism of IE using the OBJECT tag. I have not tried this with unsigned controls, but I tested the approach using Macromedia's Flash player. You can play along by visiting the Macromedia's Flash download page and getting the CLSID from the OBJECT tag in the page's source. I then downloaded the swflash.cab file from the codebase attribute of the object tag and stored it on my local disk. The example below is going to use this flash cab file and the flash Class ID. Additionally, I am going to assume the reader is familiar with COM, C++, and MFC. The code is a bit lengthy to post here, but using the steps below a reasonable Windows developer should be able to complete this exercise in an hour or two.

I chose MFC since we need to implement IBindStatusCallback. This is easily accomplished by deriving a class from CCmdTarget. Make sure the implementations of QueryInterface(), AddRef(), and Release() call the External...() base class implementations. GetPriority() and OnLowResource() can simply return E_NOTIMPL. All the other methods can return S_OK. Since this is an async callback we need to have an event handle member variable, initialized in the Constructor, and have the event set in the OnObjectAvailable() method. That's the essential plumbing for the callback class. The callbacks for download progress can be implemented for the progress bars in the MSI.

Before we continue, let's make sure we have all the data we need to install the control.

  • The class id of the control is {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}. It needs to be in this format as a string (with the braces) so we can call CLSIDFromString to convert it to a CLSID type.
  • We are going to use major and minor versions of 0xFFFFFFFF to assure it is always installed.
  • Finally, we need a codebase - or place to "download" the cab file from. Since we are installing the cab file locally, the CA needs to be appropriately place in the sequence and we need to get the local path to the file. The path needs to be in appropriate format - for a local disk where the file is at C:\swflash.cab, we need to make it file://c:\\swflash.cab

The entry point code needs to hook up the plumbing - instantiate the IBindStatusCallback implementation class, call ExternalQueryInterface() on it to get the interface pointer. Then we need to create and register the binding context by calling CreateBindCtx() and RegisterBindStatusCallback().

The meat of what we are doing is a call to CoGetClassObjectFromURL() with the parameters described above. The two common returns from this call will be
MK_S_ASYNCHRONOUS, S_OK, or an error. If S_OK is returned, the object is already installed. If the async value is returned, we need to loop until the event in the callback class is set or some predefined timeout elapses. After the event is set, check to see that the object was created based on what was set in the OnObjectAvailable() method.

Based on testing, this method appears to work all of the time, regardless of the various IE security zone settings. This is likely due to using the file:// protocol. Remember that we are dealing with a signed control - with unsigned controls, your mileage may vary. This method was not tested in IE with Server 2003 in Enhanced Security Configuration, so all bets are off there as well.

If you wish to have the installation always grab the "latest" version of the code from a URL, you will need to implement the code to change and restore the IE security settings from the article linked to above and also implement the download callbacks to move the MSI progress bar. Be sure to alert the user that you will be temporarily altering the IE security settings, and make sure when handling a cancel button press from the MSI that you restore the settings. This particular corollary to the problem can be useful if you want to refresh the clients using a simple repair/maintainence/reinstall option after the server-side control was updated without having Bob the network admin do much extra work (or having to release client side patches).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you actually seen the cab file download work under the http:// protocol as a non-admin user? Really?

Steven Bone said...

Nope, I haven't seen it work as a non-admin. The whole point of these posts is installing the CAB as an admin so someone who is a non-admin can use the control. The only thing I can think of you are referring to is the statement "Based on testing, this method appears to work all of the time, regardless of the various IE security zone settings." If you read Part I of the article, I think this may have been clearer. Or did I misunderstand your comment?

Anonymous said...

I've hit the same problem, but solved it slightly differently with a commandline tool that does the following...

1) Download the webpage, then crack all the "Object" tags using a regular expression
2) Download the referenced .cab file(s) if not installed yet, or if older verions
3) Vertify certificate trust
4) Extract cab
5) Use Setup API's to install, ignoring WFP files

The tool does not care about IE zones.

It's wrapped in either an SMS package or as a custom action in an MSI. Works like a charm!


IJ