webView and 'timeout' - iphone

Question

I have question, in my application I need to have a connection and a webview to display the web content.
The problem is that I have a username and a password which need to be right in order to get a connection. Now I want to have an alert that comes up if the username is wrong. The
- (void)webView:(UIWebView *)webView didFailLoadWithError:(NSError *)error
does not work for this, because if the username or the password is wrong it will continue loading (even though it won't display anything).
Is there a possibilty to 'tell' webview to set a time interval and then display an alert?
THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Answer 1

If you're authenticating with your server via HTTP authentication (per your comment above) then I would do this differently. When the user enters their username/pwd, make a request to any page (something lightweight) using NSURLConnection. If the username/password are incorrect you can handle the failures in the NSURLConnectionDelegate methods and prompt your user for a new username/password.
You can also do this with the iOS 5 version of NSURLConnection instead of the delegate methods but the docs aren't very good.
When this first request succeeds then load the web view.
EDIT: added example of using NSURLConnection to check if HTTP auth succeeds
Ok, here's a simple example. You can make this better by allowing NSURLConnection to load your intended request and if it succeeds load the response data into the webView vs initiating a new request. Read the URL Loading System docs to learn more about how to use NSURLConnection.
In your webView delegate, initiate an NSURLConnection with a request to the same domain as the webView request with the user credentials as follows:
- (void)performHTTPAuthRequest
{
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"http://%#:%##test.starsightings.com", username, password]]];
NSURLConnection *connection = [NSURLConnection connectionWithRequest:request delegate:self];
}
// if the request succeeds, credentials must be good so load the webView
- (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection
{
// request completed successfully so username/password must be good
[self.webView loadRequest:theRequest];
}
// ignore the failure
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didFailWithError:(NSError *)error
{
}
// if we get an auth challenge, the credentials are bad so cancel the request and alert the user
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveAuthenticationChallenge:(NSURLAuthenticationChallenge *)challenge
{
[[challenge sender] cancelAuthenticationChallenge:challenge];
// alert user that username/pwd is invalid
}