Text URL in AIR iOS app not selectable - ios

Question

I'm using AIR 2.0 (soon will be updating to 3.3 with Flash CS6) to create an iPad app. We have textfields (Classic, dynamic) which sometimes contain one or multiple htmlText links which need to be clickable. In the desktop version of the program, all text is selectable and the links are easily accessed. My problem is that it takes me mashing the link like 20 times on the iPad before it will recognize that there's a link and navigate to it in Safari. The other strange thing is that none of the text appears to be selectable - I can't get the iPad cursor, copy/paste menu, etc. to show up.
I think, from reading other threads, that the hit area for the URL is only the stroke on the text itself... if that's true, what can I do to increase the hit area? Or make text selectable? It was suggested elsewhere to put movieclips behind the URLs but that's not really possible as this is all dynamic text from XML files.
I've read about StageText but I gather this is only used for input fields, which is not the case here.
I'm reasonably advanced in AS3 but I'd prefer an easy solution over re-writing large chunks of code. At the moment the only thing I can think to do is get the URL and make it so that as soon as you touch anywhere on the textfield, it navigates to the link. But this would break down if there were more than 1 URL in a given textfield.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I had this exact same issue, and it's had me flummoxed for a while.
Here's what I did to get the desired behaviour:
1) Instead of using a listener for TextEvent.LINK, listen for MouseEvent.CLICK (or TouchEvent.TAP) on the TextField.
eg.
var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, linkClicked);
2) In the linkClicked() handler, you use getCharIndexAtPoint() to determine the index of the character that was clicked, and then from that determine the URL from the TextFormat of the character. This is adapted from a post by Colin Holgate on the Adobe Forums (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/231754)
public function linkClicked(e:MouseEvent):void {
var idx:int = e.target.getCharIndexAtPoint(e.localX, e.localY);
trace("Tapped:",idx);
var tf:TextFormat = e.target.getTextFormat(idx);
if(tf.url != "" && tf.url != null) {
var linkURL:String = tf.url;
trace(linkURL);
// Hyperlink processing code here
dispatchEvent(new UIEvent(UIEvent.LINK_TAPPED,tf.url));
}
}
3) The last line (dispatchEvent()) is sending a custom event to another function to process the link, but you could easily inline your code here.
I've tested on an iPad 3 running iOS6.1, building with AIR3.5. Links are much more responsive, and I don't find myself mashing the screen trying to hit the stroke of the text!