PhoneGap for iPhone: problem loading external URL

Question

I'm writing an application for iPad using PhoneGap and I would like to load an external URL without triggering Safari or using internal web browser like ChildBrowser.

I'm using the PhoneGap iPad/iPhone sample project and I tried different approaches. In the onBodyLoad() function I added:

window.location.href('http://www.wordreference.com');  

but this line opens the link using a new Safari window.From that point is not possible to come back in PhoneGap

Afterwards, I tried with an AJAX request substituting the content of the page using document.write

function loadHTML(url, timeout) { if (timeout == undefined)     timeout = 10000; var req = new XMLHttpRequest(); var timer = setTimeout(function() {     try {         req.abort();     } catch(e) {}     navigator.notification.loadingStop(); },timeout); req.onreadystatechange = function() {     if (req.readyState == 4) {         if (req.status < 300) {             clearTimeout(timer);              var html = req.responseText;             //just a debug print        alert(html);     document.write(html);          }         navigator.notification.loadingStop();         delete req;     }        };           req.open('GET', url, true); req.send(); } 

Now, calling from inside onBodyLoad():

loadHTML('http://www.wordreference.com',10000);  

Opens the link in the PhoneGap Container,which is fine. The point is that I want to load a dynamic page written in Python

loadHTML('http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/index.py',10000) 

At this point Safari is not called but a black page in the PhoneGap container is displayed!! I want to point out that the link is perfectly working if I type it in Safari( I cannot report it for privacy issues).

Could be it a problem related to some kind of needed permission???

I found something similar relative to PhoneGap for BlackBerry and the proposed solution was to modify a config.xml file with

<access subdomains="true" uri="http://www.mysite.com/" /> 

I tried to add this tag directly in my index.html but it doesn't work.

Is there any similar approach for iPhone??

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

I think I've found the solution,

in the PhoneGap Application Delegate .m file {YourProject}AppDelegate.m, modify the method:

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType { return [super webView:theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:request navigationType:navigationType]; } 

with

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType {  NSURL *url = [request URL]; if ([[url scheme] isEqualToString:@"http"] || [[url scheme] isEqualToString:@"https"]) {     return YES; } else { return [ super webView:theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:request navigationType:navigationType ]; } } 

This will open all the external links within the PhoneGap container!!!

ps. Around you will find references to this link but I think it doesn't work for app written using the 0.9.5 version,since Safari gets opened for external links by default.

Answer 2

For people having this problem in Android:

I don't know about earlier versions, but in PhoneGap 1.1.0 you can create a file called res/xml/phonegap.xml and list the domains which should not be opened in the external browser.

From DroidGap.java:

 /**  * Load PhoneGap configuration from res/xml/phonegap.xml.  * Approved list of URLs that can be loaded into DroidGap  *      <access origin="http://server regexp" subdomains="true" />  * Log level: ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, VERBOSE (default=ERROR)  *      <log level="DEBUG" />  */ private void loadConfiguration() { [...] 

Example phonegap.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <phonegap>     <access origin="http://stackoverflow.com" subdomains="true" /> </phonegap>