CEFWrappers v1.04 A freeware MFC Class Framework for the Chromium Embedded Framework

I was looking to embed Chromium recently in a desktop Windows MFC application and was looking for examples. An excellent starting point is https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1105945/Embedding-a-Chromium-Browser-in-an-MFC-Application from MVP Marius Bancilla. I decided to take that as the basis and implement a fresh MFC sample from scratch using the latest version of CEF. Thus was born CEFWrappers. This is a collection of freeware MFC classes which implement a fully embeddable Chromium window in a MFC desktop app using Visual C++ 2022 or later and MFC.

Usage

• Please read the article https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1105945/Embedding-a-Chromium-Browser-in-an-MFC-Application on which my code is based to get a good understanding of how to integrate CEF into your application.
• To use CEFWrappers in your code simply include CEFWrappers.h and CEFWrappers.cpp in your project and #include CEFWrappers.h in which ever of your modules needs to make calls to the various classes.
• You need to download and build CEF for Windows or download prebuilt binaries for CEF. You can download builds from https://cef-builds.spotifycdn.com/index.html. If you want to build CEF yourself, there is a article explaining how to do this at http://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2016/05/05/building-the-64-bit-version-of-chromium-embedded-framework-on-windows/. To build CEF for x64 after you have downloaded it, you should start a Visual Studio Command Prompt, navigate to the CEF x64 directory and run "cmake  -G "Visual Studio 17" -A x64 ." from the command prompt. You should then load the cef.sln file in the CEF x64 directory and Build -> Batch Build -> Select All -> Build to build all the CEF files for x64. The demo application can also build for x86. To build CEF for x86 after you have downloaded it, you should start a Visual Studio Command prompt, navigate to the CEF x86 directory and run "cmake  -G "Visual Studio 17" -A Win32 ." from the command prompt. You should then load the cef.sln file in the CEF x86 directory and Build -> Batch Build -> Select All -> Build to build all the CEF files for x86. At this point you should have all the CEF files for both x64 and x86 in the two CEF directories. If you download CEF x64 or CEF x86 to different directories, then you need to ammend the CEFWrappers project's VC Include and Lib Directories project settings.
• Your application must be linked to the same version of the C Runtime as that used by the CEF libcef_dll_wrapper project in the CEF download. The default is multi-threaded static version (/MT or /MTd). If your application is using the multi-threaded DLL (/MD or /MDd) setting then you will need to rebuild CEF to match this.
• Please note that you will need to build the debug versions of your app with _HAS_ITERATOR_DEBUGGING=0. This issue appeared in CEF M90. For details please see https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/issues/3109/windows-chrome-sandbox-crashes-with-m90.
• To successfully use CEF in your application your application must include a manifest file to indicate support for various versions of windows. If you do not do this then you will now see any output in your CEF windows. Please see CEFDemo.exe.manifest in the download for details.
• The classes are designed for VC 2022 or later. They have not been tested on earlier releases of Visual C++.
• The class CCEFAppHandler in the demo application is responsible for process specific callbacks from CEF.
• The class CCEFDelegate in CEFWrappers is the main callback interface which is used by the CEFWrappers framework.
• The class CCEFClientHandler is responsible for browser specific callbacks from CEF and will end up calling CCEFDelegate virtual functions as required. Note currently this class implements support for CefClient, CefDisplayHandler, CefLifeSpanHandler, CefLoadHandler, CefRequestHandler & CefResourceRequestHandler CEF interfaces. There are numerous other CEF interfaces which could be included in this class going forward.
• The class CCEFView implements a standard CView derived class which you can reuse in your application to host a CEF browser window.
• The class CCEFDoc is a CDocument derived class to go along with the CCEFView class.
• All places which show CEF integration in a typical MFC MDI application are highlighted in the CEFWrappers code using a "//CEF_INTEGRATION" comment, which you are search for.
• The sample application shows a custom URL of http://tests/intro.html which is implemented using embedded resources in the demo application. This is implemented using classes called CCEFDemoBinaryResourceProvider & CCEFDemoClientHandler in the application. The intro.html is the main start page for each new MDI browser child window and provides links to four other example pages. These include a PDF file embedded in a html page, a standalone PDF file and two png image files.
• Please note that the sample application is a bare bones example of CEF integration and features such as Print, Print Preview, Cut, Copy, Paste, download support etc are missing. For examples of this please check our the cefclient sample application in the CEF download.
• Please note that during testing of the demo application with CEF, I got inconsistent errors reported in the debugger when calling CefShutdown during application shutdown. This I believe is due to some resources not being correctly released using the reference counting mechanism which CEF uses. I was not seeing these errors when testing with the release versions of CEF and the errors were inconsistent, random and not URL specific. CEF recommends a two stage approach to clean application shutdown as documented at https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/wiki/GeneralUsage.md#markdown-header-browser-life-span. I initially implemented this approach in the demo application in CEFWrappers, but was still getting inconsistent errors on shutdown so I have left the code using a DestroyWindow API approach in the CCEFView::CloseBrowser method which is called by CMainFrame::OnClose as part of demo application's normal shutdown. This is the approach used by the SDI application in the CodeProject article. If any person has advice on how to improve this, please let me know.
• Once you have got everything compiled and working, you will need to ship additional files with your application to support CEF at runtime. These files are documented in the README.txt file in the root directory of the CEF download. This will comprise approximately 236 MB of files for the latest Windows 64-bit cef_binary_120.1.10+g3ce3184+chromium-120.0.6099.129 version of CEF. By default these files should be located in the same directory as your application exe, but the CEFWrappers demo application as of v1.01 shows you how to locate CEF to a different directory using delay loading.
• For further information on developing with CEF and the functionality it provides, please review the comprehensive documentation on the CEF wiki web site at https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/wiki/Home.

The enclosed zip file contains the wrapper class source code and a simple VC2022 demo application which exercises all of the framework classes functionality.

Copyright

• You are allowed to include the source code in any product (commercial, shareware, freeware or otherwise) when your product is released in binary form.
• You are allowed to modify the source code in any way you want except you cannot modify the copyright details at the top of each module.
• If you want to distribute source code with your application, then you are only allowed to distribute versions released by the author. This is to maintain a single distribution point for the source code.

Sample Screen Capture

This is the demo application included in the CEFWrapper download in operation on Windows 10:

Updates

v1.04 (26 December 2023)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated code to pull in CEF v120.1.10.
• The sample project included in the download is now for VC 2022.

v1.03 (20 August 2022)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the code to use C++ uniform initialization for all variable declarations.
• Added SAL annotations throughout the codebase.
• Updated the compiler and linker settings of the demo app to more modern defaults.
• Updated the demo application to compile, link and release against the latest version of CEF which is v104.4.24 as of August 2022.

v1.02 (3 December 2020)

• Updated the demo application to compile, link and release against the latest version of CEF which is v87.1.11 as of December 2020.

v1.01 (7 March 2020)

• Updated the demo application to only create the CCefAppHandler instance prior to calling CefInitialize in the CCEFDemoApp::InitializeCef method in the demo app. This is a small optimzation to make the demo application code more consistent with the cefsimple application.
• Updated the CCefAppHandler class to support the CefBrowserProcessHandler interface.
• Updated the CCEFView::SetupClientHandler method to not set the web_security settings value to STATE_DISABLED. This allows the demo program to better render some web pages.
• Updated the sample application to include x86 build configurations in addition to the existing x64 build configurations.
• Updated the demo application to load CEF from a subdirectory called "CEF" below where the main exe is located. To see how this is done, please see the code in CCEFDemoApp::InitInstance.
• Made CCEFView::SetupClientHandler method virtual.

v1.0 (17 February 2020)

• Initial public release