Android Launch Browser from App to handle external URLs

Upon googling for this one, I found some good relevant links on stack overflow as well as the android webview documentation, but no singular solution that tied everything together.

First, I created a custom WebViewClient class. Note that this is optional as you can do inline class declarations in this environment.

package com.example.testapp;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Context;
import android.net.Uri;
import android.webkit.WebView;
import android.webkit.WebViewClient;
import android.content.Intent;

public class MyWebViewClient extends WebViewClient {
@Override
    public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
        if (url != null && url.startsWith('http://192.168.1.101')) {
            return false;
        } else {
        	view.getContext().startActivity(
                    new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(url)));
            return true;
        }
    }
}

Then, in the main activity, use code within onCreate to support for multiple windows and to set the web view client to your own custom client.

package com.example.testapp;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.webkit.WebView;
import android.webkit.WebViewClient;
import android.view.KeyEvent;
import android.webkit.WebChromeClient;
import android.net.Uri;

public class MainActivity extends Activity {

	private WebView webView;
	
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    	final Context context = this;
    	
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

    	webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webView1);
    	webView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
    	
    	webView.getSettings().setSupportMultipleWindows(true);

    	webView.setWebViewClient(new MyWebViewClient());
    	webView.loadUrl('http://192.168.1.1/login.aspx');
    }

If you want to use an inline class declaration instead of defining a seperate mywebviewclient class, you can also use something like:

    	webView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
    	      @Override
    	      public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
//etc, same code as above
    	      }
});

If you have not already addressed the question of handling the android back button within your webview, the android documentation has a good quick simple code reference on how to accomplish this.

Enjoy. 🙂

References
StackOverflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5979361/android-open-url-in-a-new-window-without-leaving-app

StackOverflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7028258/launch-browser-from-within-app-how-do-you-get-back-to-the-app

Android Documentation, http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html

Advertisement

About Ronnie Diaz

Ronnie Diaz is a software engineer and tech consultant. Ronnie started his career in front-end and back-end development for companies in ecommerce, service industries and remote education. This work transitioned from traditional desktop client-server applications through early cloud development. Software included human resource management and service technician workflows, online retail e-commerce and electronic ordering and fulfillment, IVR customer relational systems, and video streaming remote learning SCORM web applications. Hands on server experience and software performance optimization led to creation of a startup business focused on collocated data center services and continued experience with video streaming hardware and software. This led to a career in Amazon Prime Video where Ronnie is currently employed, building software and systems which stream live sports and events for millions of viewers around the world.

Posted on October 10, 2012, in Programming & Development and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

  1. You made my day!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: