How to make hyperlinks in pdf displayed in UIWebView work - iphone

Given a pdf created with pages that includes working imbedded hyperlink, stored as a resource with my app and displayed in a UIWebView, what needs to be done to make the hyperlink work in in the UIWebView.
Scouring the posts here and elsewhere on this subject it appears that a link should just work if you want it to display in Safari. I can't get them to work.
In pages I created the document and created a hyperlink to http://www.excite.com/ for testing purposes. I then exported the document as a pdf. The link works fine when the pdf is displayed in Preview. I then added the pdf to my app resources folder and loaded it into the UIWebView. The link does not work.
The UIWebView was created with IB and I have the Links property checked.
I am loading the pdf with the following code...
NSString *pdfPath =[[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath] stringByAppendingPathComponent:[documents objectAtIndex:documentNumber]];
pdfUrl = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:pdfPath];
[webView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:pdfUrl]];
What more do I need to do?
For now I just would like the link to open in Safari. Eventually I will need to have links that allow me to link to other pdfs in my resource folder and display them in the same UIWebView. To do this I understand I will need to implement a UIWebViewDelegate.
Thanks,
John

Related

Embedding video into UIWebView - Using link like 'http//qa.test.com/2323bjdsdd2232332'

Its known that we could embed local media files inside webview and links such as from youtube (streamable).
But I am not sure, if we can link to urls like above. I tried with <embed>, <video>, <iframe> and <object>. Nothing worked for me.
NSString *htmlString = #"<html><head></head><body><video
width="%0.0f" height="%0.0f" src="%#"></video></body></html>";
NSString* html = [NSString stringWithFormat:url,self.webView.frame.size.width,self.webView.frame.size.height,self.htmlstr];
[self.webView loadHTMLString:html baseURL:nil];
I am answering with certain observation, correct me (this answer) if its wrong.
Local file or a link (itunes music or movies link) can be given to
and played on UIWebView
Remote link (file) can be shown as well, but it has to streamable like youtube link. Just giving a link wont solve the problem it seems.

HTML file creation with image

I created an HTML file programmatically with images sources. The images are stored in the documents directory. The problem is that when I give the image source path as document directory path the images are not shown in Windows.
So, I choose the second option is to give only the image's name instead of whole path. Then it work well on Mac & Windows, but now images are not shown on the device's UIWebView.
Then I selected to open the HTML file in Safari insted of UIWebView, but the safari could not be opened because URL becomes NULL.
My code to open Safari is as follow:
NSLog(#"%#",documentsDirectory);
NSString *urlStr = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#/AccReport1.html",documentsDirectory];
NSLog(#"urlStr :: %#",urlStr);
NSURL *url1=[[NSURL alloc]init ];
url1 = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:urlStr];
NSLog(#"url :: %#",url1);
[[UIApplication sharedApplication]openURL:url1];
I want to mail the HTML file that contains images. And these HTML file and images are stored in document directory. I want to show this HTML file with images in windows browser, mac browser and iphone's safari.
How to do this?
One of the simple way to solve your problem is to keep Images and HTML file in same directory and refer those images in HTML files just by name and if you put them in a folder then give the complete path.
The images are not showing because the image path specified within the HTML code is not the documents directory path.
I suggest you might have to construct an html string and then subject the uiwebview to load that string
NSString *htmlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"<html><body><img src=\" %#/image.png \"></img></body></html>",documentsDirectoryPath];
[webView loadHTMLString:htmlString baseURL:nil];

Open PDF file contained in the URL

I have a link that contains a downloadable pdf file. This link doesn't have its extension as .pdf, its just a normal link. Its a web-service where i pass "PDF" as a parameter that returns me a PDF file. Whenever I open such link on a desktop browser, it directly ask for downloading the pdf. Into my ipad app, i need to display such pdf in a web view. What can be the possible solution?
You should make a url request and load that in to a Webview like this,
NSURLRequest *request = [[NSURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url];
[webView loadRequest:request];
The url is your link to the PDF file and webview is UIWebView object where you can view the PDF.

iPhone UIWebView slow loading to local HTML files

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.

Is that possible to cache UIWebView in iPhone?

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.