How to pass URLs to Published Internet Explorer

Someone from Browsium asked me to look into a way of launching a published version of Internet Explorer and passing a URL from the client to the server. If you don’t know who Browsium are, take a look at their site or some of the articles that have been written about them on Brian Madden

If you publish Internet Explorer executable followed by %** it will accept parameters passed to it from the client.

Launching published applications from the command line with Web Interface and Receiver Enterprise is documented in CTX122795

Use the following command to launch I.E and pass through the URL.

%ProgramFiles%CitrixICA Clientpnagent.exe” /CitrixShortcut: (2) /QLaunch “FarmName:PublishedAppName” https://www.shaunritchie.co.uk

Using StoreFront and Receiver none of these command line options work.

If you look at the properties of a published application shortcut in your Start Menu you will notice that it points to an executable in the folder %APPDATA%CitrixSelfService

Receiver Places an executable and a config file for every single published application that you have subscribed to in this folder.

I’ve extracted one of the .exe and inside is a number of .bin files and the icon file. One of the .bin files contains the information that is populated into Programs and Features by Citrix Receiver.  The rest are unreadable (to me) Anyway, besides the point.

If you want to pass a URL to a published version of Internet Explorer using StoreFront you just need to call the executable in this folder and follow it by the the URL.

E.G

“%APPDATA%CitrixSelfServiceInternet Explorer.exe”  https://www.shaunritchie.co.uk

This will work regardless of whether the Receiver is already running or not.

In both instances you should always start the URL with http, just using www can cause the passthrough to fail.

What’s nice about Browsium is it can handle all this command line stuff and automatically intercept URLs based on rules and pass them over to XenApp