How to reload page on a Cordova project?

Question

I am building an app, using polymer starter kit & cordova to wrap the project. Now, since I use firebase as a database for storing data, I ended up using two native firebase javascript function to find user data:

getAuth()

var ref = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com");
var authData = ref.getAuth();
if (authData) {
  console.log("Authenticated user with uid:", authData.uid);
}

onAuth()

var ref = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com");
ref.onAuth(function(authData) {
  if (authData) {
    console.log("Authenticated with uid:", authData.uid);
  } else {
    console.log("Client unauthenticated.")
  }
});

Those two functions require a reload to bring back data from firebase, but :

window.location.reload();

doesn't work

Alos looked for a Cordova plugin: webview-reloader, installed it but redirect and reload still not working.

When i use the reload() function the screen of my android phone is going white and the application stop working. Need to close the app and open it again.

Answer 1

Since Cordova is a wrapper around a browser window:

window.location.reload(true);

It works for the browser windows as well as a Cordova app.

Answer 2

This works for iOS and Android (at least with 2016 platform versions).

// keep startup url (in case your app is an SPA with html5 url routing)
var initialHref = window.location.href;

function restartApplication() {
  // Show splash screen (useful if your app takes time to load) 
  navigator.splashscreen.show();
  // Reload original app url (ie your index.html file)
  window.location = initialHref;
}