I am testing on the Android Emulator for now. I had a pre-existing mobile webapp that I put into the src/ directory of a fresh Forge workspace. Everything is working pretty well, but...
When the app goes into the background (in this case on account of me pressing the home button, but could also happen as a result of an incoming phone call) and then I return to it, it's back at index.html, regardless of which page I was on before I went into the background.
Is there a way to have it preserve its state like a real app would?
I have not seen this issue because I use a single .html page app with backbone.js. However, you can possibly try to mitigate this issue by using the event module.
You could "save" the current page in this event:
forge.event.appPaused
Then you could "resume" your page using this event:
forge.event.appResumed
Related
My problem
I'm working on a project where Cordova is being used to display a remote website within the app. Cordova.js is being run from the remote server, etc., and this works pretty well.
I do have one issue though, especially on iOS devices.
If the device lose connection at the same time as I press a link on the website, the page will turn blank, as if to load the next page - but since the connection is lost nothing will be loaded into this blank page. Given iOS devices lack of back-buttons or such there's no way to navigate from this blank page except by closing the app and re-opening it.
My attempted, and failed, sollution
So, given that I can use Cordova.js to check for connection issues, I figured that I could use an iframe to display the remote website. If the connection goes bye-bye I'd just display a simple error message inside the iframe.
And well, this does work.
BUT. And this is a big but. InAppBrowser will not run from an iframe. And I can't live without the InAppBrowser, since it's used to display quite a few important features within the app.
So
Does anyone know a way to either:
a) Handle connection issues when running only remote content in the Cordova app?
b) Run the InAppBrowser from within an iframe? (I suppose I could use PostMessage etc. between the frames, but since I'm already sending/receiving data from the InAppBrowser I would love to avoid this in order to limit complexity).
c) Solve this issue in another fancy manner?
We have link functionality in our web application that when clicked, browses to a page on our server that performs the following:
Tries to open the custom url to our ios application
If this fails, it redirects the user to our ios app store to download the app.
This actually all works perfectly well.
However, it creates a weird corner case, where after a user has done this and finished, if they come back sometime later and open their safari on the same phone, if our web link is still the active tab, it will redirect them again to our application.
The cause of this is fairly obvious, but we are struggling to come up with a solution for it. Is there any known to rectify this behavior, either through a different mechanism then I described for opening the application or through somehow killing the page simultaneously?
I am creating a phonegap application that posts the login information to my website. When user signs off I want to come back to my app. Do I just send the url location along with the post data so that I can come back? or there is another elegant way?
Also when user clicks on the iphone home button, I want the application to exit. Currently it just saves the session and the page and goes back directly to the page if I start the application again.
I am using adobe phonegap site to build and test the application
From your description, I assume that you are navigating the Phonegap WebView (which is running your app) to the URL of your website?
If so, at this point you no longer have an app to navigate back to - the WebView has lost its handle on your app. In order to "navigate back" to your app, you should use the InAppBrowser plugin to navigate to your website. This will allow you to return to your app after the user logs out from your website. You'll need to somehow communicate the logout from your website in the InAppBrowser WebView to your app in its WebView. You may be able to achieve this with cross window messaging.
You can't "exit" an app in iOS - the OS does not allow you to do this. The best you can do is use the resume event to detect when your app has been restored from the background, then manually reset your app to its initial state.
I have an application built using XPages' mobile controls. On an ipHone the application behaves as I would like in the standard Safari browser. When I take the url and add it to the Home Page as an icon and use the application from there every time an action I take invokes a native application (Maps, Contacts, Phone, attachment viewers etc.) when I switch back to my application I am immediately asked for my userid and password again. Is there a way to control the behavior to not lose the login credentials the same way that the standard Safari application seems to.
This is a limitation in iOS. If you save it to the home page like that it works, but it will NOT multi-task. That's the problem. So it doesn't remember where you were or anything like that.
As David mentions it starts all over again when you switch back.... The problem is not only the credentials - it is also all the information you may have entered or where you have navigated to in the "app".
This is why I am changing to another approach. I am starting to write apps as web-apps that run locally (i.e. cache the ressources and run on the cached versions of the JS-files, CSS and images). Then I implement a localstorage where you can track where in the app you are - and return to that place again. This way you do not need the authentication for running the app - only for synchronizing the information with the server. My approach is to save data locally and sync them to the server (as a sort of replication). This obviously gives more work - but it also gives a better user experience since you can run the "app" without being connected.
I have tried to control the caching locally using a cache.manifest file. This can be done, however, it is a pain. Therefore, I am now using Sencha Touch which really does this nicely.
/John
PS. I think you may be able to handle the login issue by using the XPage Dojo login custom control (http://www.openntf.org/internal/home.nsf/project.xsp?action=openDocument&name=Xpages%20Dojo%20Login%20Custom%20Control) - however, it does not solve the issue with reloading the page...
It seems the secret to success here is NOT to tell Safari the XPage is capable of acting as a mobile web app. Add the following code inside for the XPage to ensure this is the case.
<xp:metaData
name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable"
content="no">
</xp:metaData>
Note: You can still provide an icon for the home screen, its just that icon will now act more like a bookmark with the Safari controls and (more importantly) you can switch between applications and when you return to Safari it will display your Xpages app just as you left it.
2nd update, March 2014: Apple closed the bug saying they don't have enough information, but my project is a big PHP application that I can't (and won't) fully send to Apple for them to reproduce this problem. If anyone has a shareable, simple, pure HTML app that exhibits this problem as well, please let me know and I'll submit it to re-open the bug hoping they'll look into it.
1st update: as more users are reporting this issue and nobody has a clue, I have filed a bug report at Apple. If anything useful comes out of that which is not under NDA, I will post it here.
After installing a (jQuery Mobile) web app I am developing to the home screen of my iOS 6 device (iPhone 5), the network activity indicator in the status bar at the top of the screen keeps spinning even after the page is loaded completely. The behavior shows only when the page is opened through the web app; surfing to the same page in Safari on the same device doesn't show the infinitely spinning activity indicator.
Removing all AJAX calls and page content doesn't make a difference; the problem persists even when the web app consists only of an empty page like this:
<html>
<head></head>
<body><br/></body>
</html>
The issue was solved by deleting the web app from the home screen, surfing to the page in Safari and re-adding it to the home screen as a new web app.
My guess is that the problem lies in the meta data that iOS stores at the moment a web app is added to the home screen (such as the values in the apple-mobile-web-app-capable and apple-touch-startup-image meta tags).
At least some of that information does not seem to get refreshed when accessing the page as a web app, even when it starts serving completely different content (such as the empty page shown in the question). I know this is true for the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag; adding that tag to a site that has already been installed to the home screen does not suddenly make it a native-looking web app; the tag has to be present at the moment of adding the web app to the home screen.
I think I must have installed the initial web app at a stage of development where the page referred to a non-existent resource (such as an image, CSS or JS file), resulting in a web app that keeps looking for non-existent content even though the current web page is no longer referring to it, possibly explaining the infinite activity indicator behavior.
I am not certain that that is the cause, but it does seem the most likely explanation for this issue.
If you encounter this; check that all resources your page refers to exist, then delete and re-add the web app to the screen to see if it fixes the issue.
I have the exact same issue, and it goes away when I remove the bookmark from the homescreen. But the activity indicator starts spinning again after the webapp has been used for some time.
I don't see any failed requests in Apaches access log during initial load, and no requests appears when the activity indicator starts spinning, so I don't think the problem is about a non-existent resource.
However, I see in the access log that iOS Safari insists on requesting a whole batch of Apple-specific files such as apple-startup-image and apple-startup-icon when in full screen mode. This is just like how Google Chrome insists on requesting favicon.ico (sigh!). Sadly, when I satisfy Safaris thirst for apple-files it doesn't stop the spinning disc :-(
I have had the Mac OSX web inspector enabled for my webapp and it registers no network activity or other issues whatsoever.
In the Apple manual (http://support.apple.com/manuals/) page 12 for the iPad it states that the activity indicator is for "network and other activity". It doesn't say that Safari uses the indicator for anything else but network activity, but maybe it's a hint.
For the time being, I have come the temporary and unsatisfying conclusion that it's an iOS issue that's beyond web developer control. I'll keep hacking at it and post any new findings here. Perhaps together we can uncover the mystery :-)