您可以在WCF服务下运行WebBrowser吗？

Question

I'm currently trying to move over a screen-scraping program (c# forms application) to a WCF service.

The screen-scraping program uses WebBrowser to grab info off several pages for which there is no API. I would like to know if you can run WebBrowser in a service let alone a form. I'm currently developing on XP to be release on Server 2003.

Currently when running unit test, I can only see the WebBrowser if it was made on the "Unit Test" side and even then I need to manually pop up MessageBox 'es to get WebBrowser to stop from not navigating with a blank screen.

The program is being moved and split up since we are having multi-threading issues.

Answer 1

You would be better off using a headless browser like Phantom.js: http://www.phantomjs.org/ . It offers significant features and has no problem being executed wherever you need like a regular command - line program.

Answer 2

In thinking about this, realize that each instance of the WebBrowser control is actually an instance of Internet Explorer. Your question then becomes one of having a service start multiple instances of Internet Explorer.

But Internet Explorer is an interactive application. It expects to control the keyboard and mouse when it has the focus.

• Which keyboard and mouse do you want it to control when running in the server?
• How many keyboards and mice does your server have?

You could find some way for the service to launch a Remote Desktop connection and start up your Windows Forms application. You could then have your Windows Forms application host a WCF service, and the two services could talk to each other. I have seen this sort of thing done when it was necessary to automate a specialized interactive program which could not be made into a service.