cordova - PhoneGap: Opening external URL's in Safari

Question

I've just upgraded to PhoneGap 1.6.1 and I can no longer get external URL's to open in Safari.

Prior to this version I had patched AppDelegate.m as follows:

- (BOOL) webView:(UIWebView*)theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest*)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType
{
    NSURL *url = [request URL];
    if ([[url scheme] isEqualToString:@"http"]) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];
        return NO;
    } else {
        return [self.viewController webView:theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:request navigationType:navigationType];
    }
}

I notice that a similar question has been asked before: How can I open an external link in Safari not the app's UIWebView?

But it looks to me like this answer no longer works on version 1.6.1.

I've also tried setting OpenAllWhitelistURLsInWebView in Cordova.plist but neither setting gives me Safari.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The best way to open links in a new URL is actually with window.open. Just set the target as "_system":

window.open("http://stackoverflow.com", "_system");

Before I found this in the docs, I actually wrote a plugin to do the same. I'm going to leave this answer here, because this would give you much more granular control over handling of links.

With PhoneGap 2.3+, I was unable to get URLs to open in Mobile Safari in any way. Using _blank didn't work, and I tried window.open(url, '_blank'), but this now opens the URL using the InAppBrowser plugin (which pretty much sucks). I thought it was interesting that that one used a plugin though, so I decided to write a plugin to open URLs using the standard method of opening URLs in iOS apps. You can see/grab the code on this gist here: https://gist.github.com/typeoneerror/5097118.

In my example, I wired up links that have a class called "_blank" with jQuery and opened those URLs with the plugin call:

// execute the plugin called OpenUrl, signature:
// exec(successCallback, errorCallback, pluginName, pluginMethod, params)
cordova.exec(success, error, "OpenUrl", "openUrl", [url]);