WebView in javaFX, not work with Whatsapp web

Question

I need to access the WhatsApp Web from a JavaFX application I'm not getting. When the page opens I get a message to use another browser. I have tried to change the UserAgent but it does not work.

Code:

WebEngine eng = webView.getEngine();
eng.load("https://web.whatsapp.com/");
eng.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
eng.setUserAgent("Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36");

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

I was unable to access whatsapp from JavaFX, it does not seem to be an user-agent issue, but rather either some dependency is missing when using FX, or just whatsapp is blocking using some other metric, but found an alternative; Pandomium

It is not compatible well with JavaFX, but works well with Swing, and can access to any site without thinking about user-agent, or any dependency issue since it is a JCEF implementation, that is Chromium Framework for Java, essentially embedded Chrome for Java.

Just doing the following with Pandomium jar in your dependency does the trick;

public static void main(String[] args) {
    PandomiumSettings settings = PandomiumSettings.getDefaultSettingsBuilder().build();
    settings.getCefSettings().cache_path = "C:\\temp\\cache";
    // setting this option is paramount otherwise no cache is kept, and sesions are lost

    Pandomium pandomium = new Pandomium(settings);
    pandomium.initialize();

    PandomiumClient client = pandomium.createClient();
    PandomiumBrowser browser = client.loadURL("https://web.whatsapp.com");

    JFrame frame = new JFrame();
    frame.getContentPane().add(browser.toAWTComponent(), BorderLayout.CENTER);
    frame.setTitle("Whatsapp");
    frame.setSize(1720, 840);
    frame.setVisible(true);
}

Answer 2

The following simple WebViewTest class can help you determine the issue (or at least get closer to determining it):

package test;

import com.sun.javafx.webkit.WebConsoleListener;
import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.layout.VBox;
import javafx.scene.web.WebEngine;
import javafx.scene.web.WebView;
import javafx.stage.Stage;

public class WebViewTest extends Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Application.launch(args);
    }

    @Override
    public void start(final Stage stage) {
        // create WebView
        WebView webView = new WebView();
        webView.setFontScale(1.20);
        webView.setZoom(1.20);

        // print debug info
        WebConsoleListener.setDefaultListener(
                (webView1, message, lineNumber, sourceId) ->
                        System.out.println("Console: [" + sourceId + ":" + lineNumber + "] " + message));

        // create WebEngine
        final WebEngine webEngine = webView.getEngine();
        webEngine.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        webEngine.setUserAgent("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36");

        webEngine.load("https://web.whatsapp.com/");

        VBox root = new VBox();
        root.getChildren().add(webView);

        Scene scene = new Scene(root);
        stage.setScene(scene);
        stage.show();
    }
}

The console output when running the above code on my machine is the following:

Console: [https://web.whatsapp.com/vendor2.3973e7c149ced441846f.js:11] Unhandled rejection: https://web.whatsapp.com/vendor2.3973e7c149ced441846f.js:12:20732
Y@https://web.whatsapp.com/vendor2.3973e7c149ced441846f.js:11:7487
G@https://web.whatsapp.com/vendor2.3973e7c149ced441846f.js:11:7307
getDatabaseNames@https://web.whatsapp.com/vendor2.3973e7c149ced441846f.js:12:20699
deleteLegacyDBs@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:16:16530
i@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:16:14199
"cceejgejjg"@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:16:16681
a@https://web.whatsapp.com/progress.05fda25452b93c319bddcb3c2f6fdcb3.js:2:111
"hcddbeaic"@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:15:10748
a@https://web.whatsapp.com/progress.05fda25452b93c319bddcb3c2f6fdcb3.js:2:111
"baggieehcg"@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:22:22662
a@https://web.whatsapp.com/progress.05fda25452b93c319bddcb3c2f6fdcb3.js:2:111
"jfefjijii"@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:9:25328
a@https://web.whatsapp.com/progress.05fda25452b93c319bddcb3c2f6fdcb3.js:2:111
i@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:10:30397
d@https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:6:11780
r@https://web.whatsapp.com/progress.05fda25452b93c319bddcb3c2f6fdcb3.js:2:5338
onload@https://web.whatsapp.com/progress.05fda25452b93c319bddcb3c2f6fdcb3.js:2:4883
Console: [https://web.whatsapp.com/app.cf6d46b7e29e2f232d65.js:3] XMLHttpRequest cannot load https://web.whatsapp.com/img/c5088e888c97ad440a61d247596f88e5.png due to access control checks.

The part that says Unhandled rejection: https://web.whatsapp.com/vendor2.3973e7c149ced441846f.js:12:20732 points to a (pretty unreadable) JavaScript file on the page you are trying to load.

My JavaScript is not very strong, but from what I can tell from a quick look, the page seems to require IndexedDB support, which is not available (to the best of my knowledge) in JavaFX WebView.