Subscribe to our RSS feed!

URL Parameters In ClickOnce Apps

Some time ago, when I wrote the blog post importer for BlogEngine.NET, I wanted to be able to display different text in the ClickOnce application dependant on the user opening it directly from a web page.

I did some digging and found out that ClickOnce supports query strings just like a website.

That made it possible to create a link similar to this:

BlogConverter.application?url=
http://blog.madskristensen.dk/&username=my username


Enable URL parameters

In your ClickOnce project, right-click the project file in Solution Explorer and click Properties. Select the Publish tab and press the Options… button. Here you need to check the Allow URL parameters to be passed to application checkbox and hit the OK button.



Retrieve the parameters

The next thing was to find out how to retrieve the values of the query strings, because a ClickOnce application does not have an HttpContext so there is no Context.Request.QueryString property.

Instead, you need to retrieve the query strings from the application deployment context. I used this handy method, which returns a NameValueCollection of all the query strings.

using System.Deployment.Application;
using System.Web;
using System.Collections.Specialized;

private NameValueCollection GetQueryStringParameters()
{
NameValueCollection col = new NameValueCollection();

if (ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
{
string queryString = ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment.ActivationUri.Query;
col = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(queryString);
}

return col;
}


It's pretty easy if you know where to look.

Comments

Bookmark and Share

About the author:
Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in 2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/
Get Your Site Submitted for Free in the World's Largest B2B Directory!

*Mandatory Field
* *

URL Parameters in ClickOnce Apps