Friday, September 11, 2009

Cabinate files .. Invoking local files from Html page

I was stuck at work as i had to find some way so that i can execute local file system files from the application running in web browser.
started googling and my collugue stumbled across the concept of .cab file and Object tag in html page. As brwoser just understands few mime-type so i was not sure if it can execute some exeutable present on file system. I thought it might have security concerns and brwoser might not support that MIME type but we found that browser has this octet-stream mime type which can be used to execute the .cab file.

MSDN provide some platform SDK which can generate .cab file for set of executable. That can be used to generate .cab file. In order to run that file from browser, we need to change the browser's security settings. Browser's security settings can be changed or .cab file can be signed by using certificate generater program. One such program was also provided by microsoft MSDN library.

Finally we were able to generate cab file and execute a local file system application from a button click on HTML page.

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