force a webview link to launch safari?

Question

I have a uiwebview embedded within an iPhone app of mine. I want to be able to have certain links within that webview open into the full mobile safari app (i.e. not my embedded version of it). Is there a simple way to structure some of my hrefs to force this, instead of every link opening within my embedded webview?

Thanks.

-tony

Answer 1

I haven't tried this myself but I think that you can implement the UIWebViewDelegate method

webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType 

which will be called anytime a link in the UIWebView is clicked on. In that method you just need to determine if the clicked link should result in launching Safari or not and use openURL if it should.

(BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType {

    // Check if this was a click event and then some other criteria for determining if you want to launch Safari.
    if (navigationType == UIWebViewNavigationTypeLinkClicked && [Some other criteria]) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:request.URL];

        // Return false to indicate to the UIWebView to not navigate to the linked target
        return false;
    }

    // Return true so that the UIWebView loads the link target
    return true;
}

Don't forget that you need to set your UIWebView delegate property to an instance of the class that implements the UIWebViewDelegate.

Answer 2

To expand upon what Randy said, this is what I use in my application to make every http://, https://, and mailto:// URL open in the external Safari or Mail applications:

-(BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType; 
{
    NSURL *requestURL =[ [ request URL ] retain ]; 
    if ( ( [ [ requestURL scheme ] isEqualToString: @"http" ] || [ [ requestURL scheme ] isEqualToString: @"https" ] || [ [ requestURL scheme ] isEqualToString: @"mailto" ]) 
        && ( navigationType == UIWebViewNavigationTypeLinkClicked ) ) { 
        return ![ [ UIApplication sharedApplication ] openURL: [ requestURL autorelease ] ]; 
    } 
    [ requestURL release ]; 
    return YES; 
}

As Randy says, you'll want to implement this within whatever class you set to be the delegate of the UIWebView. To have only select URLs launch Safari, you could change their scheme from http:// to safari://, or something similar, and only kick those URLs off to the system (after replacing the custom URL scheme with http://).

I do this within my internal help documentation, which is HTML displayed in a UIWebView, so that I don't run into issues in the review process with having a general-purpose web browser embedded in my application.