Have you looked at the following from here: https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/help/dev_guide_5_12tutorial.htm ?

Microsoft.XmlHttp Object

You instantiate this COM object from a script. For instance, say you want to download an html file data you can adapt this code:

'Creates an instance of Microsoft.XmlHttp
Set http = CreateObject("Microsoft.XmlHttp")

'Disables error prompts
On Error Resume Next

'Sets the URL to download
url = "http://www.mywebsite.com/mywebpage.html
http.Open "GET", url, False

'Receives data
http.send ""
sWebpage = http.responseText

This is a very simple yet effective way to download data from the internet. Possibly the only limitation is that the method is synchronous, that is, it will block the script execution until the data finished downloading. The interface could hang until the script finished its job. Still, this can be fast and reasonable for most cases.

Please refer MSDN help on how to use XMLHTTP object.

A more complex method of accessing internet data is to use the Microsoft Web Browser.

Microsoft Web Browser Control
You can create an hidden MS Web Browser ActiveX control to download internet data. This object is very powerful and can be used for different purposes than the actual html rendering.

Refer MSDN references on this object for information on how to access various html elements, modify the presentation, properties, etc.

As a quick start, create a blank object. Then add a new script. In the menu select "ActiveX control...". Scroll down and select "Microsoft Web Browser".

You can use this simple method to navigate to a page:

Control.navigate2 "http://www.mywebsite.com/mywebpage.html"

Select "Event Wizard.." in the script editor menu and add this event:

'Fired when the document being navigated to reaches ReadyState_Complete.
Sub Control_DocumentComplete(pDisp, URL)

End sub

This function is called when the page finished loading. The mechanism is asynchronous, so Object.Navigate2 won't block the script execution flow.

When the document is complete you can use the control methods to access the page data. The simpliest one is:

Control.document.body.innerHTML

It will return the whole page content.

Passing URL Parameters
When you are passing URL parameters, no matter what method you choose, make sure to correctly escape the text parameters if they can contain special characters.

The VBScript method to do this is:

escape(string)

Ok, so I was able to make a map widget using activeX controls (using a microsoft webbrowser control and figuringout what the request URL parameters mean as far as an HTML response which is rendered by the activeX control) BUT now the problem is that the map will always be the shape of a rectangle.

To fit into my theme, I need to have the map with rounded corners-- a simple mask over the rectangular shape of the map would normally do the trick but since this is an activeX control, it doesn't follow DX's normal rules of child/parent behaviors so giving it a mask with the dimensions I want does practically nothing.

Any ideas?

essentially I want to turn this;

so that it has rounded corners instead.

Thanks,

Homer

Yep, as RomanDA says, you can't do that directly with an ActiveX control.

To deal with that, you can switch to the static map API and get a png file back when you call the API. You can then set an object to use it and apply a mask to that object. You will lose the ability to interact with the map though, as it will just be a static image.

Another option is to use a container object to hold the ActiveX control and apply a white glow to it to "hide" the corners. You can then put those inside another object to act as a rounded border.