I am working on a small app, and I would like to bundle some short text descriptions, maybe with some images, in the help section. What control should I use to place these content? UILabel doesn't look too smart because it doesn't wrap text.
I used a UIWebView for this sort of thing.
I write out the help in HTML, including images if needs be, and then load it into a UIWebView. It is pretty flexible in terms of layout and fairly trivial to implement:
[webView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"Instructions"
ofType:#"html"]
isDirectory:NO]]];
Just add the file Instructions.html to your app and you're good to go.
Related
I have a project that I am working on that requires me to be able to display an HTML file stored in a SQLite database in a uiwebview. I know how to display a local file stored in the main bundle, but I just can't figure out how to get these files stored in the SQLite database to display in the uiwebview. If anyone can help me it would be greatly appreciated. Sample project or tutorial is great! Thanks in advance!
ADDED INFO
I thought I would attach this link to help in understanding what I'm trying to do. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdblog.com.au%2Fiphone-development-tutorials%2Fiphone-sdk-tutorial-reading-data-from-a-sqlite-database%2F&rct=j&q=sqlite%20animals%20tutorial%20iphone&ei=41eIT-79L9H-2QW50tXaCQ&usg=AFQjCNGqongc81oHHa3WGFTctkBIiduCvA in the linked tutorial I have dropped the image view since I don't need it for my purposes, and I have replaced the data in the database to be the contents of an html file. In the tutorial it displays the text in a textview and I want to change it to display in a uiwebview. I want this to keep formatting and a few other reasons. Thanks to those who have posted. If anyone can help me get this it would be great!! Thanks in advance!
webView loadHTMLString:baseURL: (I assume it is just stored as a string....if you have any images, you will need to set your base directory accordingly)
[WebView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"test" ofType:#"html"]isDirectory:NO]]];
this code displays "test.html" which is located in the project folder
Got it by using
NSString *html = [animal description];
[self.animalView.animalDesciption loadHTMLString:html baseURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath]]];
when the ViewController that contains the webview is pushed into the display.
I need an undefined amount of text and one or more pictures to be scrollable as one entity. I'm quite surprised that this doesn't seem to be provided by default, I thought I've seen that several times before... I tried to google, but all I find doesn't fit. The images won't be wider than the screen, but in between lines of text.
I need something that let's me do something like:
image
textA
textA goes on
__ screen ends here, content goes on
textA goes on
textA goes on
image
image
textB
textB goes on
image
textC
The content for the text would come out of a plist, but I THINK I can predict it will be REALLY static, so I could just set the Text in IB and create a view for every content -.-.
I've read about Web View, but as far as I got it, you'd need internet connection to make that work, and the app should work without any internet connection at all.
Any suggestions or experiences concerning that?
Thanks a lot!
There different way to get things done:
If you have static content and want a complicated layout and know how to do it in html you should go with UIWebview and a bundled html file and images and load it with something like:[webView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"MyStuff" ofType:#"html"]]]];
You can also do a layout with UILabels and UIImageviews and arrange all of this onto one UIScrollview
If it's more dynamic you should go with the latter, but you need to program sort of layout algorithms that handle different number/sizes of images, number/length of test paragraphs and so on.
One option, as you mention, is UIWebView.
It does not require a connection, since you can load a static HTML into it executing:
– loadHTMLString:baseURL:
By specifying a baseURL that "points" to your bundle, you can also include images as resources in your Xcode project and have them displayed (by using <img src=... /img in your HTML):
NSString* basePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];
[_label loadHTMLString:text baseURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:basePath]];
You don't need an internet connection to make a web view work. Look at this method on UIWebView:
- (void)loadHTMLString:(NSString *)string baseURL:(NSURL *)baseURL
I'm developing an app that requires caching web pages (completely) along with their CSS files and images after saving the entire HTML of the page (going through the links to store each file along with the HTML file).
While viewing the HTML file offline, UIWebView takes a long time to load the page, given that I'm already offline, and the file is on disk along with its CSS and images.
I'm using this code to load the file:
NSData *htmlData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:htmlFilePath];
[wView loadData:htmlData MIMEType:#"text/html" textEncodingName:#"UTF-8" baseURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:self.htmlFolderPath isDirectory:YES]];
Is there any other means of loading the file to the UIWebView that can load it faster?
P.S: it loads very fast on simulator (offline) but on device it takes a long time (considering its an already offline cached file)
Thanks for help.
Is your solution actually cache things other than the html file, meaning pictures, css, etc, AND relinking them in the html page? I am guessing that you are downloading and caching the html page and external resources then the UIWebView is loading that html and still going out to load the external resources. That would explain the fast performance on the simulator and the slower performance on device.
Here is a library designed to do exactly what you are trying to do: ASIWebPageRequest.
It should also be noted that it could simply be a case of disk i/o bottlenecking. I know on my project, I was loading large images in a uitableview and even after they were cached I noticed quite a bit of lag when pulling them off the disk because they were so big.
I've found certain kinds of CSS can grind WebView rendering to a halt. For example:
body { -webkit-box-shadow:inset 0 0 100px #222; }
This works great in the simulator, looks nice too. But on the phone (even the iPhone 4, iOS 4.2), a simple page will take 10sec to render.
Since this probably just takes time because it needs to parse and render the page, you may consider firing up the UIWebView in the background; i.e. added as a subview, but not visible.
Maybe the UIWebView is smart enough to know it doesn't need to do anything, but I suspect that at least html and css parsing is done right away.
If it doesn't do anything without being visible, reduce size to 1x1 and set opacity=0, and put that pixel some place where it can't interfere with touch event handling.
Not perfect but it may work.
I'm almost sure you will never be able to do this. The UIWebView just needs some time to process your webpage even when it's a local page.
Keeping that in mind you can try to preload the page before it's being shown. For example if you show it after a user presses a button, preload the page when you show the button instead of when the user actually presses the button. The user doesn't notice the slow loading, because it's being handled in the background so when the user presses the button the page is already been loaded.
I can give you an idea about alternative ways of loading HTML from file into the UIWebView. A small project I've got uses Objective-C as a pure wrapper for UIWebView
The project is here, but the main code is below: http://github.com/robb1e/iWeb
- (void)viewDidLoad {
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"test" ofType:#"html" inDirectory:#"."]];
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[webView loadRequest:request];
[super viewDidLoad];
}
I'm also exploring ways of improving the perceived performance by showing an image while the DOM is getting ready. Some answers I've had are here:
Displaying a background image on UIWebView
Just if in case someone happens the same to me...
I had a UIWebView that was loading a string html and every resource (js and css) was stored locally.
I've faced that loading the content with internet connection it was some kind of slow (1 or 2 seconds to load and appear the webview in my controller) but when I tried to load the same page WITHOUT internet connection it was fast, really fast.
I've remembered that my HTML template had this in the start <base href="http://somesite.com" /> that I've used to load some images whit relative paths in some contents.
Removing that work as charm. So that can be making your web view load slower even if you don't have any reference to extern content in your HTML.
Even in my case, while loading local html files to webview was taking too much time.
Try to load local html files as below, it worked for me:
NSString *htmlFile = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"website_and_mobile_tnc-1" ofType:#"html"];
NSString* htmlString = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:htmlFile encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];
[_TandCView loadHTMLString:[headerString stringByAppendingString:htmlString] baseURL:nil];
If you want to load using NSData, try to make baseUrl to "nil" in your code.
I have modified your code as below,
NSData *htmlData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:htmlFilePath];
[wView loadData:htmlData MIMEType:#"text/html" textEncodingName:#"UTF-8" baseURL:nil];
I didn't tried this, but please try and let me know.
I have a HTML Ajax website which consists only of one HTML file. How can I create an iPhone App out of it? The HTML file should be stored locally on the iPhone so it functions offline.
UIWebView *htmlView = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0,0.0,320.0,380.0)];
[htmlView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"index" ofType:#"html"]isDirectory:NO]]];
[self.view addSubview:htmlView];
[htmlView release];
Depending on what level of AJAX you're using, the "CSS Ninja" has a nice tutorial on how to add the proper code your HTML file to make it accessible offline.
You can look at something like PhoneGap or iui.
You will probably want to do at least a tab bar with the webpage in one tab and an "about" or something in the other. Apple has been known to refuse apps that are just a straight up wrapper of a single page.
Finally I found two very good video tutorials which are explaining how to build an "UIWebView for iPhone App"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZcND6ZVOYw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZKSbb40Jp8
I was using NYTimes iPhone application, I become bit curious when I notice that it cache UIwebview even though I didn't open that article.Does anyone have idea how to do that?
How NYTimes iPhone application doing offline reading?
Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Amit
I wrote the NYTimes app. Here are some details that you could have gotten by looking inside the app bundle.
I download the HTML for the articles, strip out whatever unsupported HTML and JS crud the producers stuffed in it and cache it in the backing store.
The article content is contained in a series of P tags (HTML fragment). I stuff that into a special HTML skeleton page that ships with the app. The static wrapper page also contains CSS and JS used to properly display the article and lazily load the images.
The image loading is really cool. The web view is notified when the images are ready. layout is not affected because I already know the sizes of the missing images.
You can use UIWebView to load html files stored locally on the iPhone.
NYTimes app is probably caching html and images in local storage.
Search google for "UIWebView local" and you get several useful hits.
I tried it out and it works great:
First, create a "view based application" and add a UIWebView to the NIB.
Second, add this code to your UIViewController code:
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"index" ofType:#"html"];
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path isDirectory:NO];
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[webView loadRequest:request];
[super viewDidLoad];
}
Third, add a file called "index.html" to your "Resources" folder in xcode and it will be displayed.
UPDATE:
Indeed, the complicated part of this is downloading the images and stylesheets for the webpage. Doing this server side is easy with Simple HTML Parser (and PHP). Just package everything in a zip and download to your iPhone.
Alternatively, you could do it locally with a C/C++/OBJC HTML parser (libxml2.2 is available on iOS). See this SO question Parsing HTML on the iPhone.
It's going to a bit of a project, so good luck.