Generate webpage thumbnail image (CSWinFormSaveWebpageToImage)

CSWinFormSaveWebpageToImage Overview

Summary:

The project illustrates how to save the webpage as an image.

The code sample creates a WebBrowser to retrieve the target webpage’s
html code and uses be WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap method convert the html
code to .bmp image. In this code-sample, users can set the image’s width,
height and browser’s width, height, generate an appropriate image.

Demo the Sample.

Please follow these demonstration steps below.

Step 1: Open the CSWinFormSaveWebpageToImage.sln.

Step 2: Expand the CSWinFormSaveWebpageToImage web application and press
Ctrl + F5 to show the MainForm.cs form.

Step 3: We will see a WebBrowser control, two TextBox controls, a Button,
and a PictureBox control on the form, you can find the WebBrowser
show a web page, the Save Page button will save the current web
page of WebBrowser control.

Step 4: Click the button to save an image in web application, you can also
preview it on the PictureBox control.

Step 5: If you update the image’s size with TextBox controls text, you can
retrieve the image in the root directory of web application.

Step 6: You can even click the link of the Default.htm page to redirect the
http://www.msdn.com, and click Save Page button to save the online
website’s page as an image, if you find the image can not contain
whole content of pages, please adjust width or height TextBox of
MainForm.cs form.

Step 7: Validation finished.

Implementation:

Step 1. Create a C# “Windows Forms Application” in Visual Studio 2010 or
Visual Web Developer 2010. Name it as “CSWinFormSaveWebpageToImage”.

Step 2. Add one windows form and one class file and named them as
“MainForm.cs”, “WebPageThumbnail.cs”.

Step 3. The WebPageThumbnail class used to receive image’s information and
generate an appropriate image with html code.

// Constructor method
public WebpageThumbnail(string data, int browserWidth, int browserHeight, int thumbnailWidth, int thumbnailHeight, ThumbnailMethod method)
{
this.Method = method;
if (method == ThumbnailMethod.Url)
{
this.Url = data;
}
else if (method == ThumbnailMethod.Html)
{
this.Html = data;
}
this.BrowserWidth = browserWidth;
this.BrowserHeight = browserHeight;
this.Height = thumbnailHeight;
this.Width = thumbnailWidth;
}

/// <summary>
/// Create a thread to execute GenerateThumbnailInteral method.
/// Because the <a title="Auto generated link to System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser" href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser.aspx" target="_blank">System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser</a> control has to
/// run on a STA thread while the current thread is MTA.
/// </summary>
/// 
public Bitmap GenerateThumbnail()
{
Thread thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(GenerateThumbnailInteral));
thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
thread.Start();
thread.Join();
return ThumbnailImage;
}

/// <summary>
/// This method creates WebBrowser instance retrieve the html code. Invoke WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted
/// method and convert html code to a bmp image.
/// </summary>
private void GenerateThumbnailInteral()
{
WebBrowser webBrowser = new WebBrowser();
try
{
webBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false;
if (this.Method == ThumbnailMethod.Url)
{
webBrowser.Navigate(this.Url);
}
else
{
webBrowser.DocumentText = this.Html;
}
webBrowser.DocumentCompleted += new WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventHandler(WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted);
while (webBrowser.ReadyState != WebBrowserReadyState.Complete)
{
Application.DoEvents();
}
}
finally
{
webBrowser.Dispose();
}
}

private void WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e)
{
WebBrowser webBrowser = (WebBrowser)sender;
webBrowser.ClientSize = new Size(this.BrowserWidth, this.BrowserHeight);
webBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false;
this.ThumbnailImage = new Bitmap(webBrowser.Bounds.Width, webBrowser.Bounds.Height);
webBrowser.BringToFront();
webBrowser.DrawToBitmap(ThumbnailImage, webBrowser.Bounds);
this.ThumbnailImage = (Bitmap)ThumbnailImage.GetThumbnailImage(Width, Height, null, IntPtr.Zero);
}