How does iBooks do this?

Question

I am currently displaying text in a uiwebview. However, I would like to allow a user to select text and perform some action with the selected text (google it). Apple has done this sort of thing with iBooks. When you click on a word you can choose to look up the word in a dictionary. How can I do the same thing with Webview?

UIMenuController seems to be what I need to look at. But I couldn't find any sample code on how to do this. I'm new to iPhone development please help.

Answer 1

Starting in iOS 3.2 you can use UIMenuController to add additional UIMenuItems to the system menu that appears when selecting text in a UIWebView. Here's a simple example:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];

    UIMenuItem *defineItem = [[[UIMenuItem alloc] initWithTitle:@"Define" action:@selector(defineSelection:)] autorelease];
    [[UIMenuController sharedMenuController] setMenuItems:[NSArray arrayWithObject:defineItem]];
}

- (void)defineSelection:(id)sender {
    NSString *selection = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"window.getSelection().toString()"];
    // Do something with the selection
}

Apple describes how this works in the Adding Custom Edit Menu Items section of the Device Features Programming Guide.

Answer 2

This recent blog post from a developer would seem to suggest that at least in the iPad iOS branch, some iBooks functionality is based on private APIs.