App Inventor: Open links in new window from a webview?

Question

How can I make sure that all links in the webview component in an app-inventor program always opens as a new window? ie, using "full browser".

I checked the FollowLinks option but that just opens the links within the webview only. Unchecking that option disables all links inside webview.

Also, the hyperlink displayed inside the webview has the target="_blank" attribute set.

Answer 1

unfortunately this is not possible with the webview in App Inventor, however you could use the activity starter to start a browser instead Taifun

Answer 2

You can do this by extending the WebViewClient and overloading the shouldOverrideUrlLoading method. This method gets called whenever you click a link within the webview.

In your overload method you will generate an intent to open the browser and start an activity with this intent. Finally you use the setWebViewClient method on your webview and pass your extended WebViewClient as a parameter.

I have some example code within a project on github. In line 115 the WebViewClient is set. In this example only special links will be loaded in external browser. The intent for that is generated in line 130.