Getting WebView To Load New Pages

Lead Hacker — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:31:16 +0000

There are a bunch of examples of using WebView to display HTML content loaded from the web in an Android app, including the sample from Google for the WebView class. However the ones I found generally don’t load new pages on their own. I can load up Google, but if you click on anything in the app it launches a browser and takes the user out of the app. The answer to the problem is in the additional points on that Hello, WebView page – you need to set a new WebViewClient to handle the URL load requests. Their example is very helpful, but I prefer to do the override with an anonymous inner class:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    WebView webview = new WebView(this);
    webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
    webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
        @Override public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
            view.loadUrl(url);
    	    return true;
    	}
    });
    webview.loadUrl("http://google.com");
    setContentView(webview);
}

However, if you follow a link to an image it downloads instead of opens in the view. That’s the same thing the built in browser does, but wasn’t the behavior I expected. I’ll have to figure out how to handle that a bit better.

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Getting WebView To Load New Pages