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In the last installment of this series, we looked at how you gain access to the HTML code of a web page using the Visual Basic 6 WebBrowser object. That's a good first step toward doing something a bit more interesting, which is completing a web form using the VB6 WebBrowser object. Last time around we wrote a simple program that took a look at my home page and showed you the HTML. Now, we're going to use the information we learned there to figure out how to automatically search my site for anything mentioning Visual Basic. The first step is to identify the form used on my site for the search function. As it turns out, the search form on my site is contained in the following code: <FORM action=index.php method=post> <DIV class=searchblock id=searchblock>Enter Keywords: <INPUT
class=inputbox onblur="if(this.value=='') this.value='search...';"
style="WIDTH: 128px" onfocus="if(this.value=='search...')
this.value='';" size=15 value=search... name=searchword> <INPUT
type=hidden value=search name=option<DIV align=left><INPUT class=button style="WIDTH: 35px" type=submit
value=GO> </DIV></DIV>
</FORM>
Since this is the first form in this particular web document, we should be able to access it as "Forms(0)" through the WebBrowser.Document object's "Forms()" collection. (If it had been the second form to appear on the page, we'd use "Forms(1)", etc.) To see if this is the case, we add the following code to the WebBrowser1_DocumentComplete event to read as follows: Private Sub WebBrowser1_DocumentComplete(ByVal pDisp As Object, URL
As Variant) If URL <> txtURL.Text Then Exit Sub
If pDisp <> WebBrowser1.Object Then Exit Sub
txtHTMLDisplay.Text = WebBrowser1.Document.Body.innerhtml
txtURL.Text = WebBrowser1.LocationURL
WebBrowser1.Document.Forms(0).Item(0).Value = "Visual Basic"
End Sub
When we run the program this time, sure enough the program fills the web form's search term box with the phrase "Visual Basic":  The Search Form, Filled In Now we need to have the program submit that form. Looking at the HTML code above for the form, we see that the submit button is the THIRD Item in the Form (since counting starts from zero, the third item will be "Item(2)"). To have the program automatically click that button for us and start the search, we add the following line to the end of the DocumentComplete subroutine's code: WebBrowser1.Document.Forms(0).Item(2).Click After running it again, we see that the program loads my home page, fills in the search term "Visual Basic" and clicks the submit button to submit the search, obtaining some search results:  Search Results Returned This was by design a very simple example. We'll look at a much more complicated form next time and see how we would go about automating it using Visual Basic.
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