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Microsoft Producer provides the user with the Publish Wizard. This tool, which is accessible from the program user interface, moves through a series of pages that prompt the user for the information needed to publish the Producer presentation to a remote server or a local hard disk. The first page of the Publish Wizard offers the user three publishing options: My Computer, My Network Places, and Web server. This SDK deals only with functionality related to the Web server option.
When the user clicks the Web server button, two other controls become enabled. One is a command button labeled Learn More. When the user clicks this button, a hosted browser window opens that, by default, displays a Web page from the Microsoft Web site. This page allows the user to choose e-services from third-party Web hosting service providers.
The other control that becomes enabled when the user clicks the Web server button is a drop-down list that contains all the remote servers that have been added to the Windows registry on the user's computer. The default item in the list is Add a New Web server. When the user accepts this default setting and clicks Next, the Publish Wizard proceeds through its default pages for acquiring publishing data. When the process is finished, the user will have created a new Web server that will be available from the Web server drop-down list in future Producer sessions.
If the user chooses an e-service from the Web server list, the user interface changes to display a hosted browser window that acts as custom dialog box.
As the e-service author, you must implement a custom user interface. To provide a custom user interface, you specify a value for the HTMLBasedUIURL subkey that is associated with your particular WebHost key in the Windows registry. If no value is present for this subkey, Producer will, by default, show the standard Publish Wizard user interface. The Producer object model contains methods you can use to write values to the registry, or you can create a file with a .reg file name extension that contains script to make changes to the registry. For details about both processes, see the Programming Guide section.
The following is a screen capture example that shows a custom user interface in the Publish Wizard.
When the user chooses your e-service from the Web server list, you can control the user experience and publishing process. Simply use the Producer object model in the script code contained in the Web page specified in the HTMLBasedUIURL registry key. You can use this Web page to collect any information from the user. You can retrieve from the user all of the parameters relevant to the publishing process, you can specify all the values by default in your script code, or you can choose to do anything in between. Finally, once all the necessary values have been specified, the e-service must initiate the publishing process. Producer displays a dialog box with progress bars to advise the user about the time remaining before the file copying is completed.
The following is a screen capture example that shows the progress dialog box.
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