Phonegap: iFrames and external URLs - ios

I am in the process of creating an iOS app with Phonegap and jQuery, however, I am running into issues trying to allow both iFrames (to load normally) and external URLs (to open in Safari). I decided to choose the path of using iframes as I was not able to send POST and open the resulting page in Safari (i was trying to create a mobile friendly login window that opens to the full site in safari).
I recently updated to v1.5 hoping to resolve the issue, but it still occurs.
I have tried the trick "[url scheme] isEqualToString:#"http"...." however this forces any page in the iframe to load in safari.
So, I would like either to have external URLs and iframes to behave just like it does in a Webapp (add to homescreen button on iOS) or be able to send POST to Safari?
Has anyone got ideas? :)
Thanks!

You could change tactic slightly and login fully using your app, but then create an authentication token which would be passed via a standard link to be opened in safari.
You could generate the token new each time. Tokens are a valid system for access.

Related

Prevent web browser to try to navigate to unknown URL scheme

When I use a service used for online authentication, I get an url to navigate to that will automatically open an app that is used for the passcode input.
The url is in this format:
bankid:///?autostarttoken=2a1b5e2c-c9fb-4402-1239-2a1619d655e9&redirect=null
The navigation to this kind of urls do only make sense on a mobile unit where a certain app is installed.
Nevertheless, desktop browsers (not everyone) also try to navigate to such an url, like it would ever be possible. That of course results in an error page.
Why do they do that?
Do I need to use a hidden form?
Will every mobile unit honor that?
The custom URL scheme is used to be able to start an application locally, in this case the BankID client which handles the 2FA.
This works nicely on both mobile and desktop, as long as the custom url scheme is registered. AFAIK for mobile, if the URL scheme is not registered locally, it will query the appstore and let the user install from there. The BankID is available for both iPhone and Android in the appstore. On Windows it also query the appstore, but the BankID client is not available as Windows App, so it has to be installed manually from https://install.bankid.com. On Mac I have no idea if it queries the app store, but I know it has to be installed manually from https://install.bankid.com
Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Windows mobile, Windows XP and later, MacOSX all honors the custom URL scheme but it also need to be honored by the browser, which all the major browsers do.
Historically, before mobile, we used to start programs using the NSS plugin support in the browsers. NSS plugin support was removed by the browsers since it was easy to mis-use from a security point of view.
That's why the custom URL schemes are used.
As you can read about in the BankID relying party guidelines, there is a transition to use https://app.bankid.com links to start the client instead. Basically, that's just a custom url scheme similar to bankid:// but registers both protocol (https://) and host (app.bankid.com), which then starts the app. This has the added benefit that if a user who hasn't got the client installed and is not able to find the client via a appstore or similar, will get the web site available, which then can help the user to install the client.
As the idea of an applink is to let the user navigate to the website if the URL is not registered locally, don't hide the navigation.

Enable session cookies for iframe in page in WkWebView / mobile Safari

I have a website that is iframed into a 3rd party webpage, which is itself embedded in a WkWebView in an iOS app. Mobile Safari and the WkWebView reject the session (http-only) cookies being sent for my website, breaking basically everything. The work-around in mobile Safari is to either enable all cookies in settings (yuck) or instruct users to visit my site directly (so it counts as a "site I visited", as far as Safari is concerned); neither of these is particularly palatable. I have found no work-arounds for the WkWebView.
This question is two-part:
1) I am thinking of implementing a redirect service in my website, that takes a destination URL as a parameter, and simply redirects the user to that URL on page load. The 3rd party site can then link to my redirect page with the URL set to send users right back, with the hope that this will count as "visiting" my domain, enabling cookies to be loaded.
Alternatively, the 3rd party site could open a new tab to my site, that closes immediately on load. I expect that this would be a less optimal user experience, however, and so would prefer not to go this route.
Best of all would be for the "POST to a hidden iframe" trick (3rd party page POSTs to my domain in a hidden iframe), but as SO questions indicate that trick no longer works.
Are either of these viable solutions, or has Apple blocked these methods of getting the session cookies set as well? Is there a better solution that I have not considered?
2) Is there a way to set the cookie acceptance policy with WkWebViews like could be done with UiWebViews? My searches of StackOverflow suggest not, but the answers I read could be based on older versions of iOS (the app requires iOS 9+).
If there is no app-code solution for WkWebViews, would the solutions for mobile Safari also work with WkWebViews?
I just had a similar issue. I have a WkWebView which loads my web app that has an iframe loading a login screen from a specific server. The login page would complain that the iframe did not allow cookies.
When I would load the login page directly in the web view, it would work and it would also curiously start working as well when I tested it afterwards again inside the iframe.
The best explanation I found for this is, cookies are only allowed to be saved in the iframe if the web view has directly loaded the domain of the iframe at least once. Knowing this, I was able to implement a workaround.
By simply pinging the login page once with the webview, I use the WKNavigationDelegate to wait until I start receiving some data from the server. Once this happens, I make the web view load my page that contains the iframe. Now the iframe is able to consistently load the login screen.

The redirect_uri URL must be absolute error for deep linking URI fbAPP_ID://

Everything was working fine until today I've tried to test Safari Facebook login mechanism on my app and I started getting the following error on web browser:
The redirect_uri URL must be absolute.
I'm not using the Facebook SDK (for various reasons outside the question's context, so don't ask why) and I'm trying to open the following URL manually:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=MY_APP_ID&response_type=token,granted_scopes&redirect_uri=fbMY_APP_ID://&scope=user_friends,user_birthday,email,user_photos&default_audience=friends&sdk=ios
Everything was working fine, until today where I realized that the URL isn't executing properly. I didn't change any app settings or anything. How can I complete my login flow? Yes, I need to redirect back to fbAPP_ID:// to launch my app back when using iOS versions lower than 9.0 where native Safari isn't supported. Or is there any known way of redirecting back to the application pre-iOS 9 from external Safari? (other than me redirecting to website, then on my website, redirecting back to my app by force opening fbAPP_ID:// from Javascript)
The only "redirect_uri" that works out of the box is fbAPP_ID://authorize , this is the one used by the Facebook SDK and anyone can use it as well.

iOS deep linking is stripped out in Gmail

I'm trying to send an email with deep linking to my iOS app, using myapp:// format to open it up from email. It works (i.e. tapping on it opens the app) in any iOS mail client (Mail, Mailbox, etc.) but not in Gmail app (or even web), that strips it out leaving text only. Does anyone has a solution/alternative beside creating a web link that redirects then from browser to app?
Nope, unfortunately Gmail detects non-http/https protocols in links and strips the anchor () tag (so using data: or javascript: to perform a redirect is out too).
If/When Google implements Actions on Gmail for iOS/Android, those may work (https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions-overview), but as of now, they are not rendered on native mobile clients.
You can create a server with a regular endpoint that will redirect to the "special" myapp:// link.
If you are running Node + Express, here's an example of a middleware that does exactly that:
https://github.com/mderazon/node-deeplink

HTTP authentication in iOS 7 web apps doesn't respond

My organization had a web app that worked perfectly in iOS 6. You'd visit the website, the website would tell you to add the page to your homescreen, and boom, a nice HTML5 web app was added to the home screen.
Because we're processing sensitive data, the web app used HTTP authentication (via the native WebKit auth dialog) to authenticate user/passes. It worked without a hitch until iOS 7. Now when someone tries to summon the HTTP auth dialog, nothing happens. It's clearly trying to load something, as the spinner in the status bar appears, but no dialog ever pops up, essentially breaking the "app."
Has anyone else run into this? Is this something you'd consider to be a bug on Apple's end? Any workaround?
My company ran into this last fall, starting with iOS 6, and what we have been able to ascertain is that it is a genuine Apple Safari bug as part of its security "enhancements". No real explanation from them for rationale, but here is what we see in the debug and packet sniffers.
In normal operation, the Safari browser will request a page (or an object in the page) from the server on a GET. If that asset is protected with an Access Control List, in our case Apache Basic Auth, and it is the first request on that host in the session, the server will respond with a 401 HTTP response header indicating to the client (the browser) that it needs to request again, this time adding a basic auth header that has authorization credentials. The browser then presents a login dialog to the user, where they can enter user and pass credentials, and either submit or cancel the request. On submit, the client re-requests with those credentials in the auth header.
Assuming the credentials are accepted on the second GET request, the proper asset will be returned on the response, and the document in the browser will proceed with loading the rest of the page (assuming it was a page you requested). If you have embedded assets that reside on a different host, and that host requires authentication for that asset, the process is repeated as the page loads.
Here's where it gets broken. If you embed calls to objects from more than 2 hosts total on the same page, which require basic authentication, the 3rd authentication prompt on that page is suppressed, so the browser spins forever waiting for you to enter credentials on a prompt that you never see. Your Safari browser is now hung up on that stalled authentication prompt, on this and any other tab, even on a reload, and you will not get another prompt unless and until you hard-close your browser or restart your device.
This does not affect Chrome, just Safari, and it is both on an iPhone and an iPad with iOS 6 or later. I have the latest iOS version as of this writing (7.0.6), and the problem is still there.
We had a workaround last year, where we would create an internal page that had an array of each of the embedded hosts, which we would then loop through with an iframe embedding a call to the favicon.ico at that host's location. That worked until recently, where now, perhaps because of the iOS 7 feature of freezing background tabs, the auth prompts are frozen up again.
Here was the JavaScript sample:
hosts=["store","profile","www","secure-store","images","m","modules"];
devhost=location.hostname;
var i=0;
while (hosts[i])
{
newhost=devhost.replace('store.mydomain',hosts[i]+'.mydomain');
document.write("<iframe Xhidden seamless=seamless width=0 height=0 src=http://"+newhost+"/favicon.ico><img height='16' width='20' alt='NOT' title='NOT AUTHENTICATED' src=http://"+newhost+"/favicon.ico> Authenticated on "+newhost+"</a></br></iframe>");
document.write("<img height='16' width='20' alt='NOT' title='NOT AUTHENTICATED' src="+(newhost.indexOf('secure')>0?'https://':'http://')+newhost+"/favicon.ico> Authenticated on "+newhost+"</a></br>");
i++;
}
The second set in the document.write would give a visual indication of which hosts have been authenticated, as their favicon is now displayed. It also lets you know which host might be stalled, as its icon is missing.
Since this workaround stopped working on iOS 7, the only cumbersome solution we have is to pre-open a separate tab for each of the favicons (directly in the URL), enter the auth, go back, go to the next one in the list, and repeat until you have cached all of the auth credentials for all of the hosts used on the page. At that point, you can load the original page since your creds are now cached. Cruddy, and completely unreasonable for an end consumer, but is what we need to do for testing sites that are behind a public CDN, as we need to protect assets on that development site with an ACL.
As of today, we are still figuring out a better workaround. Not an issue on Android, Windows, or any other iOS.
Sure worked better when Jobs was alive.
Hope some of this helps.
I have the exact same problem. Basic authentication worked with previous iOS versions but not with iOS 7 in combination with web apps added to the home screen. I think this may be related to the dialog problem described here.
Standard dialogs are not working at all, such as alert, confirm or prompt.
The login prompt that is shown to authenticate the user is probably blocked (does not work or is not visible) and that is why the web app does not pass through the authentication phase.
I suppose Apple will have to fix this bug in a future release.
Edit: After upgrading to iOS 7.0.3 basic authentication suddenly started to work again also in home screen web app mode. Login prompt is displayed and everything works as expected.

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