Phonegap + jQuery mobile: injecting html files from iOS app's Documents folder with jQuery Mobile - ios

Question

I am developing an app which uses both Phonegap and JQuery Mobile.
The app connects to an external server to check for new content/content updates (html and pdf files).
If needed, in iOS those files are successfully downloaded into the app /Documents folder.
The app then retrieves each content file's absolute path (file://localhost/var/mobile/Applications/APPID/Documents/subfolder) and creates listviews that link to each file's absolute path.
The problem I am having is the following: tapping a listview opens the linked page BUT not as an ajax call. The page loads but then no javascript (cordova.js, jquery.js app.js etc) is referenced in the page and hence I can't navigate back to the main menu. It seems like the jQueryMobile ajax navigation stops working when I open html files in the /Documents folder.
This happens only for the downloaded content in the /Documents folder (and hence outside Phonegap's www folder).
From the remote debugger, if I try to call the $.mobile.changePage('previousPage.html')* function, the console returns that $ is not defined, as if the page couldn't reference jQuery. But in none of the pages in the /www folder I need to re-reference the js files.
The app uses a multipage layout and each page has its own javascript after the <div data-role="page" id="pageid"> container.
Each .html in the /Documents folder is structured as a jQueryMobile page (with data-role attributes).
This is the code that creates the listviews:
<script type="text/javascript">
$('#content').live('pagebeforeshow', function(e) {
var curCat = parseInt(window.localStorage.getItem('currentCat'));
console.log('PAGE BEFORE SHOW: CONTENT');
db.db.transaction(function(tx) {
tx.executeSql('SELECT * FROM `content` WHERE `content`.`catID` = ?', [curCat],
function(tx, result) {
var path = window.localStorage.getItem('contentPath') + '/';
if (result.rows && result.rows.length) {
var html = '<ul data-role="listview" id="linkUl">';
for (var i = 0; i < result.rows.length; i++) {
var filename = result.rows.item(i).index_file.substr(result.rows.item(i).index_file.lastIndexOf('/'));
console.log(result.rows.item(i).id);
html += '<li id="' + result.rows.item(i).id + '">';
html += '<a href="' + path + filename +'">';
html += result.rows.item(i).title;
html += '</a></li>';
}
html += '</ul>';
console.log(html);
$('#contCnt').html(html);
$('ul#linkUl').listview();
}
},
function(tx, error) {
console.log(error.code);
var html = '<div id="errorDB">';
html += 'ERROR RETRIEVING FILES';
html += '</div>';
$('#contCnt').html(html);
}
);
});
});
$('div#content').live('pageshow', function(e) {
$('ul#linkUl').listview('refresh');
});
</script>
where the ContentPath variable is stored as a fileSystem object's directory.toUrl();
My fear is that jQueryMobile can't ajax-pull html from an external directory (the /Documents folder in iOS), or that I am missing some attribute or setting in order to do so.
Perhaps because I am using an absolute url? If so, how can I get the relative url from Phonegap's /www folder?
Do I have to declare something on the cordova.plist file?
Also, the downloaded content won't have to contain any js, they should be only plain html, but I need to keep jQuery Mobile header/footer and navigation system in all the pages.
I am using Cordova 2.2.0 and the latest releases of both jQuery and jQuery mobile.
Thanks in advance and sorry if something in the formatting goes wrong, I am new to SO (in case I'll edit asap).

Answer 1

You can open files from the documents folder (or any other folder the app has read access to).
There are two reasons that a link may not load as an ajax page
jQuery Mobile thinks that it isn't part of the app
There is a javascript error loading the page, which causes the default link click action to run instead of the ajax loader.
You could try using a call to $.mobile.changePage instead of just setting up the links - that gives you a little bit more visibility into what is going on.
I don't think a file url in a different folder should be treated as a different domain by jQuery Mobile, but to eliminate that possibility it should be reasonably easy to construct a relative url to the documents folder.

Answer 2

Solved, and thanks to Tom who led me through the right direction.
I guess the problem was that jQueryMobile was interpreting the absolute path as a an external link and thus the WebView was opening the html files as a new file, detaching it from the rest of the application.
What I did was substituting the absolute path file://localhost/var/mobile/Applications/APPID/Documents/subfolder
with a relative one, which in my case is './../../Documents/subfolder/filename.html
and now it works like a charm.