How to detect if a link works? - hyperlink

I need to know if a link will open.

See Maximilian Hoffmann's answer for a more robust solution.
An approach like this is common - hijack the timeout to redirect to a different URL. Would this approach work for you?
<a id="applink" href="comgooglemaps://?q=Red+Lobster+Billings">Show map</a>
<script type="text/javascript">
var backup = "http://maps.google.com/?q=Red+Lobster+Billings";
function applink(fail){
return function() {
var clickedAt = +new Date;
setTimeout(function(){
if (+new Date - clickedAt < 2000){
window.location = fail;
}
}, 500);
};
}
document.getElementById("applink").onclick = applink(backup);
</script>

The solution is adding an iframe with the URL scheme to your page. It silently fails if the app is not installed, so you need to check via a timer if opening the app worked or not.
// detect iOS
if (['iPhone', 'iPad'].indexOf(navigator.platform) > -1) {
// create iframe with an Apple URL scheme
var iframe = document.createElement('iframe');
iframe.src = 'twitter://';
// hide iframe visually
iframe.width = 0;
iframe.height = 0;
iframe.frameBorder = 0;
// get timestamp before trying to open the app
var beforeSwitch = Date.now();
// schedule check if app was opened
setTimeout(function() {
// if this is called after less than 30ms
if (Date.now() - beforeSwitch < 30) {
// do something as a fallback
}
});
// add iframe to trigger opening the app
document.body.appendChild(iframe);
// directly remove it again
iframe.parentNode.removeChild(iframe);
}
I wrote a post with a more detailed example that uses this approach to open the twitter app on iOS if installed.

There isn't a way for you to know if a link will work but there is for Safari with something called Smart App Banners
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="Google Maps" content="app-id=585027354"/>
</head>
<body>
The content of the document......
</body>
</html>
What it basically does is checking if an app is installed. If it's not installed the user will be directed to the app store. If it's installed the user will be able to open the app from the website with the relevant data you'd be normally passing using the url scheme.
You could use if for Google Maps.
The down side of this is that it will only work on Safari but it's still better than nothing.

Related

How to open app or open link using a single button from email?

I need to implement a feature where I can open either a web page or the app from an email account.
For Example:
I have an app in which whenever I view any user's profile, the user receives an email. The mail contains a button "See Profile", the functionality for that button is whenever the button is tapped, it should open a mobile friendly site.
Now, my client requires that if the app is already installed, then tapping the button should open the associated app and it should navigate to the profile.
Also, if the user opens his email on a desktop, then a web site should be opened on tapping the button.
On mobile side, I think this could be done by URL scheme, but how to associate the same button for 2 different functionalities.
Instagram is already doing it.
Please help!
I came up with a simple solution but it needs your server help,
- Add a following html file in your server (update with your app urlscheme,itunes link & website url.)
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html" />
<meta name="author" content="gencyolcu" />
<title>Social Media Share</title>
<script>
function openProfile() {
var userAgent = navigator.userAgent || navigator.vendor || window.opera;
if( userAgent.match( /iPad/i ) || userAgent.match( /iPhone/i ) || userAgent.match( /iPod/i ) )
{
window.location.href = "appurlscheme://;
setTimeout(function () {
window.location = "https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yourApp/id593274564?ls=1&mt=8";}, 25);
}
else
{
window.location = "https://www.google.co.in/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=sLSuWM4B7MjwB-6LtagE"
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="openProfile()"></body>
</html>
Let us assume http://dev46.com/testfile/ this is your html file url.Email you are sending will be a html page right, So while clicking See Profile hit the above url.
Above html code is straight forward,It checks whether user comes from iPhone,iPad or iPod if it so it tries to open you apps urlscheme if available otherwise it will open Appstore.
If it is not an iphone it will open your web site.
I had tested above method it's working fine,give it a try.

PhoneGap InAppBrowser: open iOS Safari Browser

In our PhoneGap iOS application, we are using the InAppBrowser plugin to display some content, and we need to open a page in Safari from within the InAppBrowser.
How can we have links from within the InAppBrowser open in Safari?
From the phonegap documentation:
Opens a URL in a new InAppBrowser instance, the current browser instance, or the system browser.
var ref = window.open(url, target, options);
ref: Reference to the InAppBrowser window. (InAppBrowser)
url: The URL to load (String). Call encodeURI() on this if the URL contains Unicode characters.
target: The target in which to load the URL, an optional parameter that defaults to _self. (String)
_self: Opens in the Cordova WebView if the URL is in the white list, otherwise it opens in the InAppBrowser.
_blank: Opens in the InAppBrowser.
_system: Opens in the system's web browser.
So to answer your question, use:
window.open(your_url, '_system', opts);
Note that the domain will need to be white-listed.
Update 4/25/2014:
I think I kind of misunderstood the question (thanks to commenter #peteorpeter) -- you want to have some way to click a link in the InAppBrowser and have that open in the system browser (e.g. Mobile Safari on iOS). This is possible, but it will require some forethought and cooperation between the app developer and the person responsible for the links on the page.
When you create an IAB instance, you get a reference to it back:
var ref = window.open('http://foo.com', '_blank', {...});
You can register a few event listeners on that reference:
ref.addEventListener('loadStart', function(event){ ... });
This particular event is fired every time the URL of the IAB changes (e.g. a link is clicked, the server returns a 302, etc...), and you can inspect the new URL.
To break out into the system browser, you need some sort of flag defined in the URL. You could do any number of things, but for this example let's assume there's a systemBrowser flag in the url:
.....html?foo=1&systemBrowser=true
You'll look for that flag in your event handler, and when found, kick out to the system browser:
ref.addEventListener('loadStart', function(event){
if (event.url.indexOf('systemBrowser') > 0){
window.open(event.url, '_system', null);
}
});
Note that this is not the best method for detecting the flag in the url (could lead to false positives, possibly) and I'm pretty sure that PhoneGap whitelist rules will still apply.
Unfortunately target=_system does not work from within the InAppBrowser. (This would work if the link originated in the parent app, though.)
You could add an event listener to the IAB and sniff for a particular url pattern, as you mention in your comments, if that fit your use case.
iab.addEventListener('loadstart', function(event) {
if (event.url.indexOf("openinSafari") != -1) {
window.open(event.url, '_system');
}
}
The 'event' here is not a real browser event - it is a construct of the IAB plugin - and doesn't support event.preventDefault(), so the IAB will also load the url (in addition to Safari). You might try to handle that event within the IAB, with something like:
iab.addEventListener('loadstop', function(event) {
iab.executeScript('functionThatPreventsOpenInSafariLinksFromGoingAnywhere');
}
...which I have not tested.
This message is for clarification:
If you open an another with window.open by catching a link on loadstart, it will kill yor eventhandlers that assigned to first IAB.
For example,
iab = window.open('http://example.com', '_blank', 'location=no,hardwareback=yes,toolbar=no');
iab.addEventListener('loadstop', function(event) {console.log('stop: ' + event.url);});
iab.addEventListener('loaderror', function(event) { console.log('loaderror: ' + event.message); });
iab.addEventListener('loadstart', function(event) {
if (event.url.indexOf("twitter") != -1){
var ref2 = window.open(event.url, '_system', null);
}
});
When the second window.open executed, it will kill all the event listeners that you binded before. Also loadstop event will not be fired after that window.open executed.
I'm finding another way to avoid but nothing found yet..
window.open() doesn't work for me from within an InAppBrowser, whether or not I add a script reference to cordova.js to get support for window.open(...'_system'), so I came up with the following solution which tunnels the "external" URL back to the IAB host through the hashtag so it can be opened there.
Inside the InAppBrowser instance (I'm using AngularJS, but you can replace angular.element with jQuery or $ if you're using jQuery):
angular.element(document).find('a').on('click', function(e) {
var targetUrl = angular.element(this).attr('href');
if(targetUrl.indexOf('http') === 0) {
e.preventDefault();
window.open('#' + targetUrl);
}
});
Note that that's the native window.open above, not cordova.js's window.open. Also, the handler code assumes that all URLs that start with http should be externally loaded. You can change the filter as you like to allow some URLs to be loaded in the IAB and others in Safari.
Then, in the code from the parent that created the InAppBrowser:
inAppBrowser.addEventListener('loadstart', function(e) {
if(e.url.indexOf('#') > 0) {
var tunneledUrl = e.url.substring(e.url.indexOf('#') + 1);
window.open(tunneledUrl, '_system', null);
}
});
With this solution the IAB remains on the original page and doesn't trigger a back-navigation arrow to appear, and the loadstart handler is able to open the requested URL in Safari.

Links will not open in iframe target in an iOS standalone web app

I am running into a pickle. When I view my web app within mobile safari via iOS 6, I am able to successfully open up my basic target links <a href="link.html" target="mainframe"into my retrospective iframe <iframe src="http://www.linkexample.org/" name="mainframe"></iframe>
Though when the app is opened via standalone all the links exit out of the app and into Mobile Safari. You can see a working example at http://lacitilop.com/m2
Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?
You'll need to write some javascript to change the src of the iframe.
For a start, get your app working so that links will not open Safari by using something like the following (it's using jquery by the way):
if (window.navigator.standalone) {
$(document).on(
"click",
"a",
function (event) {
event.preventDefault();
var aurl = $(event.target).attr("href");
if (aurl) {
location.href = $(event.target).attr("href");
}
else {
location.href = this;
}
}
);
}
then you'll need to modify it to work with iframes too.
For more iphone app stuff you'll want to look at this:
http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.html

trigger.io - Embed external website

I would like to embed an external website in my app, so I tried it with the tag here:
<iframe src="http://www.uniteich.at" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315"></iframe>
But I get the following error: "Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL content://io.trigger.forge2dd999d0f14b11e1bc8612313d1adcbe/src/index.html from frame with URL http://www.uniteich.at/. Domains, protocols and ports must match."
So is there a good solution to embed a website in ios/android app with trigger.io?
Thanks in advance,
enne
EDIT: Ok, to make it more clear what I want: I would just like to load an external website as soon as a user clicks on a specific tabbar button at the bottom. I made this event-handler:
var dessertButton = forge.tabbar.addButton({
text: "Uniteich",
icon: "img/strawberry.png",
index: 2
}, function (button) {
button.onPressed.addListener(function () {
//LOAD EXTERNAL WEBSITE IN CONTENT CONTAINER HERE
});
});
Is that possible somehow?
This issue is cross domain requests. For more information read the same origin policy.
To get around this you will need to utilize forge.request. After adding www.uniteich.at to your config permissions first try the simple forge.get like this:
button.onPressed.addListener(function () {
var mainElement = document.getElementById("main");
forge.request.get("http://www.uniteich.at/index.html", function(content) {
mainElement.innerHTML = content;
},
function(error) {
mainElement.innerHTML = "<b>Error</b>" + error.message;
});
});
And if that does not work or not enough (I am not at my dev computer right now) you can utilize more options with forge.request.ajax.

Exoclick adult ads on mobile website with JQuery Mobile

I'm having an issue using Exoclick adult advertisement to advertise on a mobile website using JQuery UI.
I don't know how much I can disclose here until it goes too far into "adult" that I can't post it here anymore.
The Exoclick banners show, but only once! Navigating inside the site doesn't the same ad again (we have two ads, bottom and top. Each is only loaded ONCE per site traversal). If you refresh using the refresh function of the browser ("F5"), they will load again... But only once.
Alright, Exoclick gives me a snippet like this:
<!-- BEGIN ExoClick.com Ad Code -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://syndication.exoclick.com/ads.php?type=300x50&login=<username>&cat=110&search=&ad_title_color=0000cc&bgcolor=FFFFFF&border=0&border_color=000000&font=&block_keywords=&ad_text_color=000000&ad_durl_color=008000&adult=0&sub=&text_only=0&show_thumb=&idzone=<zone id>&idsite=<site id>"></script>
<noscript>Your browser does not support JavaScript. Update it for a better user experience.</noscript>
<!-- END ExoClick.com Ad Code --></div>
The thing is, this works perfectly on static sites, but due to the nature of JQuery Mobile to fetch everything using AJAX, the scripts would be loaded many times over into the browser's execution context (at least this is what I suppose happens!) and in the end... not even execute anymore?
What I already thought of:
Cache the output of the Exoclick ad script (is there something like "outputcache" for JS?)
Deactivate Ajax
I tried deactivating Ajax requests but for some reason this didn't do anything:
<script>
$(document).bind("mobileinit", function(){
$.mobile.ajaxEnabled = false;
});
</script>
Deactivating Ajax should work:
$(document).bind("mobileinit", function () {
$.mobile.addBackBtn = false;
$.mobile.ajaxEnabled = false;
$.mobile.ajaxLinksEnabled = false;
});
On the other hand, you can refresh/reload your script on each ajax success
$('html').ajaxSuccess(function() {
//reload your script using js, plenty of that on google
});
I did it... #bobek indirectly brought me to this answer.
What I did is create an invisible div which contains the ads at first. Then, on pageinit, I steal the div and remove it from DOM. The div will now have an iframe inside made by Exoclick.
Then, without the script by exoclick, I insert it back into the dom on each page init event...
To prevent that the script gets inserted back into the dom, on the server side I check for the X-REQUESTED-WITH header. If it's XMLHttpRquest, I don't send the ads.
This is how it looks in code:
The temporary ad placement, ANYWHERE on the site:
<div id="ads">
<div style="display: none" id="topad">
<?php require("./_topbannerb.php"); ?>
</div>
<div style="display: none" id="bottomad">
<?php require("./_bottombannerb.php"); ?>
</div>
</div>
The two PHP files contain the tags by exoclick. Nothing else.
A script in the head tag:
<script>
ads = "";
first = true;
$(document).bind('pageinit', function() {
if (first) {
ads = $("#ads");
ads.remove();
}
first = false;
$.each($(".adt"), function(i, v) {
$(v).append($(ads).children("#topad").first().children("div").clone())
});
$.each($(".adb"), function(i, v) {
$(v).append($(ads).children("#bottomad").first().children("div").clone())
});
});
</script>
Then, where the ads are supposed to be placed in the end:
<div class="adt"> </div>
The script automatically inserts into each ad placement. Here I have two different ad regions: Top and bottom. Both have no differences except how exoclick handles them in the back.

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