[python-win32] Dispatch InternetExplorer.Application fails

[Rickey, Kyle W]

Thanks, I'll check out those links.

 

-Kyle Rickey

________________________________

From: Gerdus van Zyl [mailto:gerdusvanzyl at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 4:11 AM
To: Rickey, Kyle W
Cc: python-win32 at python.org
Subject: Re: [python-win32] Dispatch InternetExplorer.Application fails

 

Have you seen www.htmltopdf.org?

Otherwise might I suggest http://www.openreport.org/; you could then
transform your XML into RML(xml reporting format) into a PDF. You can
also design RML with OpenOffice.

~Gerdus

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 10:41 PM, Rickey, Kyle W
<Kyle.Rickey at bakerhughes.com> wrote:

Tim, thanks for your response. I realize where I've got this messed up.

I had turned off Windows File Protection for
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer
So that I could replace internet explorer with my own executable that
calls firefox :) The reason for this is some of our proprietary software
is hardcoded to launch files in IE, but there are advantages to using
firefox instead.

Anyway, that's a bit off topic. I restored the real IE and rebooted and
now

>> ie = win32com.client.Dispatch("InternetExplorer.Application")

works as expected.

I'm also checking out PAMIE but I'm beginning to think I may be going
about this whole thing the wrong way.

Basically, said software above generates reports as xml files. The xml
file references an xsl file used to transform the report. This xml gets
launched and transformed by IE.

What we want to happen is a way to take that xml file and go to PDF. As
it is now we have to print from IE to the Adobe Acrobat PDF printer.
This is cumbersome for the amount of reports that need run. So here are
some solutions I was considering:

1) COM into IE and load the xml, print it to PDF. Works, but we still
get prompted for the file name to save the pdf as (my code could supply
an appropriate name)

2) use some python libraries (libxml2, libxslt) to transform the xml to
html. That part works but now how to I make a pdf from the html file?

3) COM into Adobe Acrobat and generate the pdf (no idea where to begin)

4) Rewrite entire reporting system to use pdf natively. Since the data
is freely available in our SQL server, this would be possible, but very
time consuming.

I'm open to suggestions on a better way to go about this. Also, assuming
I changed the registry to point to iexplore2 (original IE) would COM'ing
into work?

Kyle Rickey

-----Original Message-----
From: python-win32-bounces at python.org
[mailto:python-win32-bounces at python.org] On Behalf Of Tim Golden
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 2:46 PM
Cc: python-win32 at python.org
Subject: Re: [python-win32] Dispatch InternetExplorer.Application fails

Rickey, Kyle W wrote:
> Whenever I try the following:
>
>>> import win32com.client
>>> ie = win32com.client.Dispatch("InternetExplorer.Application")
>
> I get this traceback:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
>   File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\win32com\client\__init__.py",
line
> 95, in Dispatch
>     dispatch, userName =
> dynamic._GetGoodDispatchAndUserName(dispatch,userName,clsctx)
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\dynamic.py",
line
> 98, in _GetGoodDispatchAndUserName
>     return (_GetGoodDispatch(IDispatch, clsctx), userName)
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\dynamic.py",
line
> 78, in _GetGoodDispatch
>     IDispatch = pythoncom.CoCreateInstance(IDispatch, None, clsctx,
> pythoncom.IID_IDispatch)
> com_error: (-2147024894, 'The system cannot find the file specified.',
> None, None)
>
> Any ideas what would cause this? My end goal is to COM into IE and
load
> an xml file, then print it to PDF.

FWIW, you might find it worth looking at PAMIE which uses COM
the way you're doing, but which has already ironed out a few
creases. That said, it doesn't really answer your question. Can
you see what result this script gives:

<code>
import os
import _winreg

hKey = _winreg.OpenKey (
  _winreg.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,
  r"InternetExplorer.Application\CLSID"
)
clsid, type = _winreg.QueryValueEx (hKey, "")

print clsid

hKey = _winreg.OpenKey (
  _winreg.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,
  r"CLSID\%s\LocalServer32" % clsid
)
server, type = _winreg.QueryValueEx (hKey, "")

print server, os.path.exists (server.strip ('"'))

<code>

This should, crudely, go through the same steps that
the Dispatch process does and should show up whether
IE's not where it thinks it should be. The strip ()
on the server name is because, on my machine, the
location is double-quoted, presumably because it's
got an embedded space which would cause some problem
in the mechanism.

TJG
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