Hi Brian,
external apps are really hacky. It's a "flaw" in the Windows core system which allows us to do it in the first place. MS never intended to use the re-parenting technique and while it has some side effects, it works most of the time. If you're interested in the nitty gritty, check out this MS blog post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130412-00/?p=4683
To answer your question:
there's not really a best practice. In our experience, embedding an external browser doesn't work well. Because of the very custom windowing and UI, it can cause issues.
The built-in browser plugins in Royal TS (IE and Chromium) can embed web pages but browser extensions are not supported. This is because the extensions are part of the Chrome browser and not the Chromium browser engine.
I can, however, suggest reconsidering putting credentials in Royal TS documents because we not only support those credentials in your web page connections, we also have browser extensions for Firefox / Chrome / Edge which allows you to access those credentials from there:
https://royalapps.com/passwords/main/features
Regards,
Stefan
What if we take out the embeded bit, ie we're fine with the user's browser opening outside of the Royal TS app on click and OK with Royal TS not being able to track its status afterwards.
Is there a less hackish way of launch apps that way?
You could launch the browser directly (chrome.exe with parameters for example) and keep the window mode external or start it using a command task instead. Would that be better?
Brian Camp
Hey,
New to Royal TS and I'm in the process of setting up a Dynamic folder containing all of the various devices we manage at my company.
For some of those devices, I need to use an external application instead of the Royal TS plugin directly. For example, we use a browser extension for passwords (not switching credentials to Royal TS, for now anyways), so for web-interface devices I need to have Royal launch "https://whatever/" or "start chrome https://whatever/", so that the user's non-Royal browser (probably chrome) opens the admin URL.
What's the best way to do that? So far I have it working by having External Application plugin open the browser, and also the Web Page plugin opening externally by abusing the "Open Links in Default Browser" and web redirects.
Those are pretty hackish solutions though, and I'm wondering if there isn't a built-in option that accomplishes the same in an better fashion?