Creating the ActiveX control
Our ActiveX control will contact the MoreOver.com server using XMLHTTP. It will
retrieve an XML document containing a list of news items. In this case, we will
be retrieving video game news. Each entry in the XML file will contain a URL,
headline text, source, media type, cluster, tagline, document URL and harvest
time, as shown below:
We will use the five most recent items in the returned XML file and create a hyperlink
to each one in a new browser window. The hyperlink will feature a proper hand
icon, and while the XML is being retrieved in the background, a progress bar will
display the status of the retrieval.
Start by firing up Microsoft Visual Basic 6. Choose the ActiveX Control option
and click on the OK button, as shown below:
Name your project "prjXMLNews" and your control "ctrlNews". Set its background
colour to white. Resize the control so that it's about 2500 twips wide by 5400
tips in length. When the XML document is being retrieved from the MoreOver.com
server, our control will display a progress bar telling the user what is going
on. We need to use the Project -> Components menu option to add the "Microsoft
Windows Common Controls 6.0" library to our project. This will allow us to drop
a progress bar onto our control. We also need a reference to the "Microsoft XML,
v4.0" library.
Also, as mentioned above, our control will display the five most recent XML items
retrieved from the MoreOver.com new feed. Each one will be displayed as a label
control, which will have hyperlink to the actual URL of the news story.
There are a number of ways that we can retrieve the icon for the hyperlink (you
know, the "hand" icon). Because we are creating an ActiveX control, I have chosen
to add a picture box, with its Picture property set to the actual image of the
hand cursor. The location for this cursor varies from machine to machine, so I
have already included it as part of the control.
So far, our ActiveX control looks like this:
Now that I've described how the control will operate, and what it will look like,
let's talk about using the XMLHTTP library to retrieve our XML news from MoreOver.com.