iphone - Opening popup links in UIWebView, possible?

Question

I have a UIWebView which I'm using as an embedded browser within my app.

I've noticed that links in webpages that open new windows are ignored without any call into my code.

I've tried breakpointing on

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

and then selecting a link that would open a popup window, and the breakpoint is never hit. Is there anything I can do to intercept that selection of the popup link and get the URL and just load it normally?

I'm not interested in displaying a popup window in the app itself, I just want the URL of whatever is going to be loaded in the popup window to load in the main webview itself.

Is this possible?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I ran into this as well, and HTML rewriting was the best solution I could come up with. The biggest issue that I ran into with that approach is that the web browser is interactive for up to a couple of seconds until the webViewDidFinishLoad: method is called, so the links seem to be broken for a few seconds until they're rewritten.

There's three areas that I rewrote: links, form posts, and calls to window.open().

I used a similar approach to the first code snipped in Jasarian's answer to overwrite the target for links and forms by iterating over tags and forms. To override window.open, I used code similar to the following:

var oldWindowOpen = window.open;
window.open = function(url, sName, sFeatures, bReplace) {
  oldWindowOpen(url, '_self');
};