wwIPStuff and IE 7

Seems like a number of people have run into issues with the wwIPStuff class’ HTTP functionality not working in conjunction with IE 7. The problem is that wwIPStuff.vcx and the HTTP features that are within it have long been deprecated and there have been no updates to that library. Some years ago all the HTTP functionality moved into the separate wwHTTP class (a PRG file) and this class should be used and by all appearances it works fine and dandy with IE 7.0. The two classes have the same external interface so you can swap them pretty much without code changes – except that the PRG file is not a visual class, so you need to add a property to your form rather than adding the control on a form surface.

Now I’m not really sure what the problem is - for me both wwIPStuff and wwHTTP work on all of my machines including XP, Win2003 Server and Vista RC1. I suspect the problem is the default connection setting in wwHTTP which is set to use IE’s default proxy and configuration settings whereas the wwIPStuff class uses a direct connection. I’m not sure why all of a sudden this would start failing with the IE 7 install but apparently it does. An nHttpConnectType of 0 should be used to force use of the IE connection settings which will work 95% of the time. For the remainder you can mess around with the proxy configuration settings and varying the nHttpConnectType property to 1 (direct) or 3 (manually configured proxy).

As a general rule, you should move away from the wwIPStuff class’s HTTP interface. There have been many, many enhancements, tweaks and fixes in wwHTTP since the new class was created and none of those have been moved back to wwIPStuff. In fact if you look at the latest documentation in Web Connection and West Wind Client Tools the wwIPStuff class doesn’t show the HTTP functions any longer. In short we don’t want you to use those anymore, precisely for reasons like this <s>…