Link to resources inside WebView - iPhone

Question

I have a webview in my iPhone application, and I also have some html files inside my Resources folder. When my app loads, I load in a page from my resources into my webview. But , I need to make links inside my webview that point to some other resources (For example, images, or other html files). Just doing a relative link doesn't work:

<a href="OtherPage.html">Doesn't work</a>

Solution 1

When you load those resources, you need to set the base URL. You can do this using the method:

- (void)loadHTMLString:(NSString *)string baseURL:(NSURL *)baseURL

...where baseURL would be the file URL of your resources folder.

Solution 2

Apparently there's a bit of a gotcha according to the iPhone SDK Release Notes for iPhone OS 3.0:

Issue: UIWebView can't load local resources in apps built against 3.0.

When using [UIWebView loadHTMLString:baseURL:], the HTML string should not refer to local resources with the file:// scheme. Instead, pass in NULL or a file:// URL for baseURL:, or include the resources directly in the HTML with <style> and <script> tags.

Fair enough. But passing in a standard-issue file:// URL for baseURL doesn't quite work. However ... it turns out that, if you change / to // and spaces to %20, you will be set! (Using %20 makes a lot of sense, but the double-slash part caught me by surprise.)

Let's say you already have NSString *markup set up. Here's all you do. (I've wrapped the code here for readability. You may wish to refactor/adjust to taste.)

 NSString *resourcePath = [[[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath]
     stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"/" withString:@"//"]
     stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@"%20"];
 [webView loadHTMLString:markup baseURL:[NSURL URLWithString:
     [NSString stringWithFormat:@"file:/%@//", resourcePath]]];

So long as your CSS, JavaScript and images are referred to by filename alone, this should do the trick in iPhone OS 3.0 where loadHTMLString:baseURL: is concerned!

Solution 3

I fixed it: I used this for the BaseURL like August said:

NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];
NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];

Thank you!

Solution 4

This code would return a string with the URL of a file named "OtherPage.html" in your bundle's resources directory.

[[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"OtherPage" ofType:@"html"]] absoluteString]

Solution 5

This worked for me. My HTML files were in sub-folders (not groups) in my project. My html page is called page01 and the sub-folder is html:

NSString *resourcePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath];
NSString *pathToHtml = @"html";
NSURL *baseURL = [[NSURL alloc] initFileURLWithPath:pathToHtml isDirectory:YES];

NSString *html = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle]    
                             pathForResource:@"page01" ofType:@"html"                                                               
                             inDirectory:@"html"] 
                         encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];
[webview loadHTMLString:html baseURL:baseURL];

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