Website talking to client application?

Question

I'm working on a desktop application in Delphi 2007 and on a website where content data for this application is maintained. To view this website, the user is basically restricted to Internet Explorer 7 or higher. (Not going to support the rest.)

What I am looking for is a way to add a link to the website which would tell my already-running application to select a certain record by an ID that's passed to it from the website.

That sounds easy but it's a bit more complex than this. In the application, the user selects a dossier for a customer of the user. In this list he can find a list of products. His customer -who sits next to the user- just searches on the website and selects a product to be added. (Or the user selects one for him.)

Second Life seems to be able to do this by supporting a new protocol for the web browser. Thus, the link secondlife://gingivere/240/72/ would kick you to some place in Second Life. (Unless you haven't installed Second Life, in which case it doesn't do much.) Basically, I want to implement something similar in my application! (Must support Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista and newer versions of Windows.)

Oh, I'm using Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero Delphi 2007 and the application is a simple WIN32 application. (I also have Visual Studio 2008 available but would prefer to not use this.)

Answer 1

See Registering an Application to a URL Protocol.