>Speaking of which... did anyone try to do this with webbrowser control invisible? Scouring a webpage behind the scenes... almost like a poor man's webservice.

When I started this, nobody was talking about webservices - when switching from IE3 to IE4.

>I've built a couple of forms which did this (get values from webpages fields, sometimes set and posted some), but each time the user had to see the page, never needed to do it invisibly. Just curious - would that work?

I had usually a pageframed design with webbrowser filling most of one page, debug info in another I dynamically add when I was working on it - and this did work, at least for the sites scraped for one client, as he was intersted in certain stock trading constellations shown on the main page.

Scraping with webbrowser on visible form minimized probably worked everywhere (never got complaints). As the clients know how the program operates, I see no benefit of working invivisbly. I sometimes minimized the webbrowser dimensions (as the PI's were sometimes taxed even over the trickle feed from ISDN <g>), but a visual reminder in case of problems is better.

I did automate IE once with no GUI shown, experimented with .visible and showing off screen and went with off screen. As some of todays pages seem to work differently when user interaction (if only mouse moving) is detected, I'ld argue to keep the automated session as similar to the human operated as possible.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas