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SpecProc2Browser (SP2B) Introduction

You might want to jump straight to here [How to use SP2B]

SpecProc creates (and has always created) two types of output files: xml and text.
The text files are just that: text. They are there so you can get the data into programs like Excel easily.
The xml files are the colourful results pages that have to be opened in a web browser.

In a SpecProc method if you select "Open the copied report files when the current batch finishes" an attempt is made to open the results summary pages using Internet Explorer (IE) .
This is not something that you can configure. It specifically calls IE not your default browser.

At the time SpecProc was written the retirement of IE was way off in the far tomorrow. Now that tomorrow is today and IE has been retired and is not easily available to all users.

SP2B is a way around the IE limitation. It reconfigures the xml output files and opens them in your default browser.

Sadly there is more to it than just installing SP2B.
The xml file navigation method used in SpecProc is not supported by modern browsers.
This translates to not being able to put a file (rather than a web address) into the navigation bar of the browser. You can of course put the file path of a current SpecProc xml file into the browser's navigation bar, but nothing good will come of it.

To make things work as they always have, but in your default browser, you need to put the xml files onto a web server and remap some of the internal style pointers (not the data, just the decoration) to match this web configuration.
This means you need two things:
1. A web server and
2. Something to move and remap the xml files.

SP2B does the latter, you need to configure the former.
SP2B only works as intended with a local web server (that is one on the same PC as SpecProc) as it has to write files to the file path that is accessible to the web server.
Microsoft supply a Web Server as part of Windows, but you have to enable it. See [Web Server Setup]

SP2B copies files to the new location. It does not move them. This means the output of a SpecProc batch is still where it always is.
SpecProc is unchanged by SP2B.
To simplify your screen, you should really change your SpecProc methods to stop it trying to open results in Internet Explorere. See [Updating Method Files]

See also:
[How to use SP2B]
[Configuration]
[File and Folder Locations]
[How Does it Work?]