ActiveX cannot screen capture a page that is hosted on the same server

Question

I have an app that takes a screenshot of web pages and creates a resized image. The app is basically loading a web page that calls an ActiveX to load a web page using IE resources and take the screenshot. This app has been running on a Windows Server 2003 without any problems for a couple of years.

But now that I have upgraded the server to Windows Server 2008, the screenshot action is timing out. From tests I can see that it successfully takes a screenshot of any web page hosted on the Internet... except pages hosted on the same server.

Whenever it tries to capture a page loaded on a site hosted on the same server as the app, it times out. ESC is disabled and it seems that all other permissions are ok, ie: it works for remote pages but for home pages.

Any ideas as to what can be causing this and how to fix it?

After further testing I have narrowed down the reason for failure being due to the page being popluated from a MS-SQL database record on the same server as the one taking the screenshot. The same page generated on a remote server captures ok. I have further established that the error is not peculiar to the ACASystems DLL because it also affects another DLL for creating MHT files from web pages. This DLL (Chilkat.MHT) also uses IE to load and assemble the web page on the fly and then saves it as a.mht file.

So the problem is more related to IE assembling web pages from MS-SQL while running ActiveX. But to resolve this enigma?

Answer 1

There is no solution for this without editing the ActiveX code. Since the DLLs in question are third party resources, such editing is not possible.

After testing 3 different ActiveX that load a web page that either take a screenshot or save as .mht, it was found that they all failed when loading a page that was querying SQL on the same server. After contacting the 3 DLL developers we were informed by all of them that their ActiveX has no impact on MS-SQL.

Unfortunately, our tests tell us otherwise. At this stage we are left guessing however this article about in-process vs out-process execution may be related.

The workaround for us to solve this problem was to assemble the page to be captured from request queries passed to the page rather than populate from SQL queries. This alternate works perfectly.

Answer 2

Maybe a routing issue (DNS/hostfile..) ? Does the page loads on local session with IE ?