Why Flash can't be rendered in a Windows Service?

Question

I'm trying to solve a similar problem as was described here - to create a Windows Service for taking snapshots of rich webpages (html+js+flash) and saving them to a PDF file.

The bundle Firefox+cmdlnprint did the trick for me. I wrote a simple program running as a service that invokes Firefox to make a PDF. All seems well, the PDF gets created, but Flash is completely missing. Although, when started not as a service, Flash renders just fine.

Can anyone shed a light on what blocks Flash from rendering and if there's a workaround?

thanks!

Answer 1

I can only shoot into the dark here but two things come to mind:

• Who (which user) is your service running as? What happens if you make the service run under the administrator user?

• If your service is running on the local system account, have you enabled the "allow exchange of data between desktop and service" check box for the service (Don't know what it's named in english)? You never know what Flash may need to run.

If that doesn't work out, have you looked at Crowbar and XULRunner? I don't know for sure whether they do what you need - and if they do, whether Flash works with them - but they seem to be approaches to the same thing you are trying to do.