Web Browser User Agent

Also another thing I wanted to ask about:

I find myself having to dive into developer tools on the various browsers I work in ALL THE TIME. Is this something that is/can be developed for RDM? Seems fitting for a support tool of its capabilities. Not huge deal-breaker, but could be extremely useful.

HB

Hello,
We use the IE ActiveX, I'm not sure if we can change the User Agent. I will ask our team to investigate. For Chrome, we use a prepackaged component and it's not updated when the installed Chrome is updated. We need to update the library and update the RDM installer. What RDM version do you use?

Regards

David,

Appreciate the quick reply.

I'm on version '14.0.2.0', downloaded over the weekend, so very fresh install.

Btw, do y'all have additional detailed documentation on the usage of the 'HTML Control ID' setup tab that is part of the 'Web Browser' entry? It's unclear if I can put in any sort of jquery selectors for special cases. Some of the login pages I use can have funky results on the page. Matter of fact all I see for the 'Login Button ID' drop down of my particular page is '[ENTER]' & '[SUBMIT]', so I am not sure if that should be filling in with a certain control or what have you. Also unclear of the intention of the 'Enable web browser extension link' feature under the 'Advanced' tab. What benefit does this add, if any? I've noticed that if I open an IE in external that it will continuously add new entire browser windows rather than adding a tab to an existing window. It also doesn't bring the page to the foreground as the active application. I always have to tab to it or click on it from the task bar. A little annoying.

Overall very impressed with the application, just trying to figure out little quirks affecting my desired workflow. :) Keep up the excellent work!

HB

Hello,

The method #2 in this help article should guide you properly on the method to retrieve the ID of a username or a password field inside a website.
https://help.remotedesktopmanager.com/troubleshooting_webauthentication.htm

Regarding the [ENTER] and [SUBMIT] buttons, indeed they are in a dropdown, but the field is also a free form field, so you can type the proper ID of the button.

The enable web browser extension link allow you to open your website in external mode and use our Web Login to send the credentials to the website that you want to authenticate on - https://help.remotedesktopmanager.com/webbrowser_devolutionsweblogin.htm
If you plan to use our web login, I recommend installing the one for Firefox or Google Chrome.

Best regards,

Jeff,

Thank you for the info. Are you only able to reference a field by it's id? The login button on the site I am referring to does not have an ID specified, so it can't be referenced as so. I was hoping that the application had support for a jquery selector (like your competitor Royal TS), however testing this did not work. Is there any sort of hidden support for that? Is there any such feature for something like a custom pre-login request script?


David,

Any word on the useragent question? Another workaround I was thinking was about what I mentioned above regarding a pre-login script. Of which I could "prepare" the browser session space for the URL in question. I think it's possible to change the useragent in javascript, OR I could bypass the useragent check entirely. Although this just may end up being a feature request I suppose.

All,

I'm finding lots of little "quirks" (not necessarily bugs), so is there a good place to report such things, or just open a forum post for the specific bug or feature request?


Again, thanks for the quick replies!
HB

Hello,

I had a chat with our engineering department regarding the login button and it's not just the ID that can put in that field.
The field also support the name or the value of the button.

Regarding your other question, I would leave David respond to it.

Best regards,

Jeff,

Thanks for the reply.

I tested out one of my web connections that wouldn't work on Submit or Enter, and didn't have an ID or Name to reference, yet using the Value of the input control did work! However, what about the scenario where there is not Name, ID, or Value and yet [Submit] or [Enter] aren't working?? You might wonder how this could even work from a user's point of view if it has no visible info, however you can specify a CSS class that reference an image for the Input button to display (such as an arrow). Just food for thought. Regardless, glad at least one of them worked for my use case! Although this kind of seems like a hidden "feature" that is somewhat not common place when working in the DOM of html. Perhaps the developers just made it easier to reference an Input by reference of it's Value VS the longer line of code it would take to accomplish the same thing? I think a little more detailed documentation in this area of the control would be useful for peeps like me who need to see exactly what those fields can handle. Personally I think that the jquery selector approach would be a lot easier for y'all to manage VS all these special cases that may be hardcoded into the logic of handling these form fields. Most people who are aiming for automation of a site's login in this way AND who manage a tool like this already have a decent enough knowledge of what makes that web page tick to be able to handle putting together a more "complicated" jquery selector.

But again, I'm just glad something works for this use case. :)


Now about that useragent David... :)

HB

Hello Hector,
I don't think we can change add a custom script in the IE ActiveX. I have found a way to modify it in code but I'm not sure if it's working.

Regards

Are you saying you don't have a way to VERIFY if it is working or taking the change?

What I've been doing to test what useragent is being delivered by the various browsers is by simply loading a local file as the URL (ie. file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/UA_TEST.html), which simply prints to that page the useragent string from 'navigator.userAgent'. See the attached document.

HB

No, I've found some code to eventually do that but it's not a simple drop-in code.

Regards

Oh ok, well happy to test, help with any research, or test code. We're all C# .NET developers on our team here.

HB

@David,

Hey again :)... Just following up on this as well. A solution for the UA thing would greatly improve our usage of this product.

We're also seeing some other odd behavior that is a little harder to tell what is/isn't working. No errors are being thrown from what we can tell. See the attached screen shots. What is shown is a toolbar on our application. One of the application's tab is not visible on the EMBEDDED entry/session VS the EXTERNAL one that acts normally (both IE). So what it seems like is that a client side script is not firing that performs some sort of access validation to show/hide it. HOWEVER, we have TONS of scripts that are contained within this application, some that we manage and a ton more that we don't, so there is just to many areas for checking where this validation takes place.

We are also seeing some issues with Telerik grid controls where navigating to page 2 from page 1 will just constantly show a loading icon and never load the next results. So clearly some sort of logic is different between how the IE browser handles it and the IE ActiveX plugin you use for RDM.

All in all, I'm not really looking for y'all to help with the specific things I listed above, just need to know if you have any suggestions for how to debug an embedded web browser session in your application.

Our applications are pretty heavy reliant on things such as: 1) IE ONLY, period; 2) IE Compatibility Mode; 3) Various configuration settings set very specifically in IE's Internet Options > Security > Trusted Sites > Custom Level;. Would the IE ActiveX plugin that you use have any specific issues that you are aware of related to these sorts of things?

Thanks for any additional insight you can provide.

HB