I use Office365 and my previewing works fine, BUT I also install an old disk-based copy of Office 2007 every time I buy a new computer.
Studio marketing... I get the impression that the marketers' tales are not reviewed by anyone who really knows the software and its limitations. I have not examined the marketing material from each release, but when I have, there have always been things that weren't quite right.

If your preview is Office 2007-based, then it's sure going to work, and work great - like it used to with my previous Studio 2011 (good ol' days...). Parallel installation of Office 2007 was one of the first things I tried upon encountering problems with preview in Studio 2017, but this caused many problems with Windows not exactly knowing which Office to default to etc. I even contacted Microsoft Support on this, but they said Office 2007 is not supported anymore (which is excusable after 12 years), so they can't help.

Adrian Komiński

The answer is because the feature needs improving.  The experience is poor and only works for the simplest of files.  What else is there to tell you?  You are not a developer and I have no intention of asking a developer to waste their time explaining to you why these things don't work.  Even if you could understand it, and I doubt you would, how would this help you?

Isn't it enough for you to know that this feature needs to be improved and that we have logged it with the development team to investigate and improve it.

Just wondering after 10 months: has any progress been made with regard to preview (be it Word or HTML) reliability? Just working in MemoQ now and the HTML preview is such a convenience... MemoQ is - admittedly - a bit retarded in many other aspects, but knowing where you are exactly in the document is a great help and IMHO a core feature.

Just tried HTML preview and - nope, still the same crap. Will have to wait another 10 years apparently.

Adrian Komiński

Have you seen a new release for 2019 since your last post?  Wondering why you think it would have magically changed?

I can tell you that we are going to remove the embedded preview altogether because we are not going to be able to improve it at all.  The hooks we used to have with earlier versions of Office are simply not there and we can't do anything with it.  So in the future the external preview in Word, and the html preview will be the only ones we will support.

I for one am glad about this because at least we can focus on improving something we have control over.  But the improvements that you are probably looking are not there yet.

Well, you don't mention the preview issues (nor do you mention the possible fixes, I presume?) in release notes, do you? And there have been some updates over the last 10 months, so POTENTIALLY there could have been some fixes.

I'm not even discussing the embedded preview at all anymore, I'm only referring to the HTML one, and it's just as unreliable as before, although at present it at least highlights your location in the document - when it works. Either way, since you have admitted the improvements are not there yet, all we can do at this point is wait and hope.

Just tried the HTML preview again. The highlight feature "hijacks" (!) the cursor from the text box, making you have to click on the text in Editor again and again if you want to have usable preview. This is completely pathetic and a behaviour I remember from over a year ago. This goes to show you guys aren't doing absolutely anything (or are failing at effectively doing anything) to rectify the erratic behavior of this important feature. To make things worse, the disappearing cursor doesn't repair itself after turning off the preview - you have to reopen the project/restart Studio!

Adrian Komiński

Adrian Komiński said:

The highlight feature "hijacks" (!) the cursor from the text box, making you have to click on the text in Editor again and again if you want to have usable preview.

It is logged as CRQ-6669 (so you know what to refer to in future if we have not addressed this with the next update).  It was created in 2017, so you're right in that this has never been addressed.  Looking at the comments I can see it's been scheduled to be addressed many times but always fell out when time got tight.

So we have failed to address this, no getting around that, but it seems to be planned into the next sprint so I hope there will be a release soon with this fix in it.

Ok Paul, thanks for a straightforward response.

Has anything been done regarding the preview thing in 2021?

Adrian Komiński

I just checked the CRQ and confirm this has still not been successfully addressed.  There has been a lot of activity in the bug thread and time spent attempting to address it but each "solution" seems to cause more problems in other ways.

The final comment from product management was this:

"For those watching this CRQ - as sometimes happens, it seems we are unable to address this within the engineering teams at this point. So we need to remove the fix version for now. There is potential light at the end of the tunnel however. Microsoft have released a new web view component called WebView2 that is based on Edge and that we might be able to use in Studio down the line. This would then replace the current IE11-based control. Obviously this is a longer term initiative but I thought I'd share this info here. We will investigate this component down the line and then take things from there. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ for more info on the control. "

This planned fix isn't a small piece of work and given the number of users affected it hasn't made it into a release yet I'm afraid.  I also don't have enough information to tell you when it might do but I'll raise this again.

Adrian Komiński

I just checked the CRQ and confirm this has still not been successfully addressed.  There has been a lot of activity in the bug thread and time spent attempting to address it but each "solution" seems to cause more problems in other ways.

The final comment from product management was this:

"For those watching this CRQ - as sometimes happens, it seems we are unable to address this within the engineering teams at this point. So we need to remove the fix version for now. There is potential light at the end of the tunnel however. Microsoft have released a new web view component called WebView2 that is based on Edge and that we might be able to use in Studio down the line. This would then replace the current IE11-based control. Obviously this is a longer term initiative but I thought I'd share this info here. We will investigate this component down the line and then take things from there. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ for more info on the control. "

This planned fix isn't a small piece of work and given the number of users affected it hasn't made it into a release yet I'm afraid.  I also don't have enough information to tell you when it might do but I'll raise this again.

Thx Paul. Does the above cover the HTML preview also or the Word previews only?

Adrian Komiński

Adrian Komiński said:

Does the above cover the HTML preview also or the Word previews only?

Yes.

I did get an idea from Daniel Brockmann which might help with this.  Have you tried using Ctrl+0 which can bring the focus/cursor to the Editor?  I know it's not ideal but it might be faster than using the mouse?

Dear Paul,

Is it possible to use the WebView2 components in Studio plugin? Do you and your programmers have any experience with this so far? Any tips or tricks on how to use it?

Thank you in advance for your support.

Laurent

Laurent Pierret

Laurent Pierret said:

Is it possible to use the WebView2 components in Studio plugin? Do you and your programmers have any experience with this so far?

It is possible with some work.  We actually created a proof of concept using a Chromium based browser (CefSharp) and this was considerably faster than the out of the box solution.  We implemented it into the Report Viewer Plus.  Prior to SR2 we had to deliver some dependencies which is why the installer wasn't an sdlplugin at first, but with SR2 we were able to do this via the plugin alone.

If you want to use WebView2, which supports embedding web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) in your native apps. as I'm sure you know, then you'll need the Microsoft Edge (Chromium) control.

Before you can use the WebView2 control you need to make sure the WebView Runtime is installed. This runtime is separate from the Microsoft Edge browser, and can in theory run completely independent of Edge and if Edge is not installed at all.

This means you have to either:

• Install using a Runtime Installer (launch from an App Install or App Startup)
• Or install an Edge Canary Preview Build
• Distribute the unpacked runtime with your app

Having said this you may find that the current version of SR2 will prompt the download of the required runtime if it's not there on your machine already in which case you will only need to ship it for others not using SR2 and not using this dependency.

It's probable that future versions of Studio will use these dependencies in the product as part of the ongoing improvements.

Dear Paul

Thank you for the detailed reply. We are running SR1 currently.

I followed the instructions here: Get started with WebView2 in WinForms apps - Microsoft Edge Development | Microsoft Docs and can create a Windows Form app which displays a webpage using webview2. I tried to do the same in a Studio plugin but I am not successful. I have added references to the core and winform dlls of webview2 in the plugin manifest. When running the plugin, the winform window opens but the browser is not displayed (empty winform). Any idea about what is missing?

I will have a look at cefsharp, sounds interesting. I presume that the ReportViewerPlus is available in Github.

It would be great to have some guidance on how to use chromium browsers in plugin. The default c# webbrowser based on IE is limited and does not provide support for newer web technologies.

Thank you for your support.

Laurent

Laurent Pierret

I think the best thing would be to ask this in the dev forum as opposed to here.  I can't move your posts because you added onto a Studio thread which should be in here :-)

Laurent Pierret said:

I presume that the ReportViewerPlus is available in Github.

Not yet... but it will be.  We left it out previously because we needed to introduce a dependency, but now we don't need that we will port the code to that platform so it may be useful for you.

Laurent Pierret said:

It would be great to have some guidance on how to use chromium browsers in plugin. The default c# webbrowser based on IE is limited and does not provide support for newer web technologies.

Indeed... which is why we created the POC when we built the Reports Viewer Plus.  But if this becomes part of a future release it won't be necessary to produce a lot of help for developers.  But for now, ask your questions over in the dev forum and we can try to help.

Hi Paul, OK, will do. And thank you for the guidance. I landed here through the search function and did not even noticed that I am not in the developer forum.