Background
I'm attempting to upgrade an iOS app built on Cordova 2.0 to version 2.7.
It's basically a welcome screen that points to a remote search engine (please withhold comments about app validity and likely approval, as we're past that), and we were using the ChildBrowser plugin to enable opening links in a sub browser so as not to trap the user in the Cordova webview.
Cordova 2.7 has a feature called InAppBrowser I am hoping to use instead of ChildBrowser. InAppBrowser does essentially the same thing, aside from missing a button to open in Safari.
Problem
The existing app's remote webpages include the Cordova JS (as well as that for the ChildBrowser plugin) and it works fine for opening links in the sub browser.
My test Cordova 2.7 app doesn't seem to load the Cordova JS correctly when it's being loaded from a remote web page.
I tried using this exact same HTML on the embedded start page and a remote start page:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<script type="text/javascript" src=".7.0.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script>
document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);
function onDeviceReady() {
alert("Ready!!");
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
To test this as the embedded start page, I put this line in config.xml:
<content src="index.html" />
When I run the app, I promptly get the "Ready!" alert.
To test this as the remote start page (I'm aiming to link to the remote page in the final app, I am just using it as the start page for testing. The result is the same if I link from the embedded page.), I put this line in config.xml:
<content src=".php" />
When I run the app, I just get the blank screen and no alert.
Further, in cordova-2.7.0.js L. 6255, I changed
console.log('deviceready has not fired after 5 seconds.');
to
alert('deviceready has not fired after 5 seconds.');
With that change, running the app using the remote start page causes the blank page, and then after five seconds, I get the alert "deviceready has not fired after 5 seconds.". So this tells me Cordova JS is not starting correctly. Needless to say, I can't get InAppBrowser to launch links in the sub browser on the remote site, but I can get it working just fine on the embedded start page.
Anyone have any ideas of where to go from here? This is a pretty simplistic example, so I'm assuming this is a Cordova settings problem or a change in the functionality. I appreciate any thoughts, thanks!
Background
I'm attempting to upgrade an iOS app built on Cordova 2.0 to version 2.7.
It's basically a welcome screen that points to a remote search engine (please withhold comments about app validity and likely approval, as we're past that), and we were using the ChildBrowser plugin to enable opening links in a sub browser so as not to trap the user in the Cordova webview.
Cordova 2.7 has a feature called InAppBrowser I am hoping to use instead of ChildBrowser. InAppBrowser does essentially the same thing, aside from missing a button to open in Safari.
Problem
The existing app's remote webpages include the Cordova JS (as well as that for the ChildBrowser plugin) and it works fine for opening links in the sub browser.
My test Cordova 2.7 app doesn't seem to load the Cordova JS correctly when it's being loaded from a remote web page.
I tried using this exact same HTML on the embedded start page and a remote start page:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mydomain.com/mobile/cordova-2.7.0.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script>
document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);
function onDeviceReady() {
alert("Ready!!");
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
To test this as the embedded start page, I put this line in config.xml:
<content src="index.html" />
When I run the app, I promptly get the "Ready!" alert.
To test this as the remote start page (I'm aiming to link to the remote page in the final app, I am just using it as the start page for testing. The result is the same if I link from the embedded page.), I put this line in config.xml:
<content src="http://mydomain.com/mobile/index.php" />
When I run the app, I just get the blank screen and no alert.
Further, in cordova-2.7.0.js L. 6255, I changed
console.log('deviceready has not fired after 5 seconds.');
to
alert('deviceready has not fired after 5 seconds.');
With that change, running the app using the remote start page causes the blank page, and then after five seconds, I get the alert "deviceready has not fired after 5 seconds.". So this tells me Cordova JS is not starting correctly. Needless to say, I can't get InAppBrowser to launch links in the sub browser on the remote site, but I can get it working just fine on the embedded start page.
Anyone have any ideas of where to go from here? This is a pretty simplistic example, so I'm assuming this is a Cordova settings problem or a change in the functionality. I appreciate any thoughts, thanks!
Share Improve this question asked May 1, 2013 at 3:12 Charlie GorichanazCharlie Gorichanaz 1,2041 gold badge10 silver badges20 bronze badges 2- I just tested with Cordova 2.6, and this exact setup with 2.6 works fine. The Cordova JS works on the remote pages. So something changed in 2.7 to break this. – Charlie Gorichanaz Commented May 1, 2013 at 19:16
- This seems related but with the prior version, so it's kind of strange: issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-3029 – Charlie Gorichanaz Commented May 2, 2013 at 0:35
6 Answers
Reset to default 10Yes, something broke in 2.7 - related to our cordova-cli work. See: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-3029
The fix is to add an empty file called "cordova_plugins.json" in your root folder.
I had a similar problem relating to upgrading to Cordova 2.7. However my problem was all my console.logs stopped firing when running the app. I couldn't figure out why for the life of me this was happening. I thought it was because I upgraded jquery.mobile. That wasn't it. I then thought it was an .htaccess issue, that wasn't it either. It turns out, it was Cordova 2.7 that was causing this problem.
I did try adding the .json file on my server, that did not fix the issue.
The fix was going into the 2.7 source and commenting out the following code:
/*comment out this as it is breaking console.logs
var xhr = new context.XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onload = function() {
// If the response is a JSON string which composes an array, call handlePluginsObject.
// If the request fails, or the response is not a JSON array, just call finishPluginLoading.
var obj = this.responseText && JSON.parse(this.responseText);
if (obj && obj instanceof Array && obj.length > 0) {
handlePluginsObject(obj);
} else {
finishPluginLoading();
}
};
xhr.onerror = function() {
finishPluginLoading();
};
xhr.open('GET', 'cordova_plugins.json', true); // Async
xhr.send();
*/
Replace entire block with a call to the following function:
finishPluginLoading();
My logs are now working again. Only took me 3 days scratching my head.
Hope this helps someone with a similar problem.
If you embed Cordova in the external web page, there will be no way to open the InAppBrowser from within your hybrid app, so Cordova will not be able to load. This is because the InAppBrowser requires Cordova to be fully loaded and initialized before it can be used to fetch a remote page. You need to use your HTML page that you have, with the <script type="text/javascript" src="http://mydomain.com/mobile/cordova-2.7.0.js"></script> as the main entry point for your app. Then you can use the InAppBrowser to open up your remote page. (You could probably do this in the onDeviceReady(), not sure if it would "flash" the page first though.) I don't think the remote page should have any Cordova code in it at all. I'm not sure if it would be possible to even interact with Cordova from the remote page due to the Same Origin Policy (probably you could use features of the InAppBrowser to inject "bridge" code though to get around this.)
As Shazron mentioned the problem is the issue with the file"cordova_plugins.json".
To solve the problem not changing the code you can create the "cordova_plugins.json" file in the root folder and insert a content between quotation marks inside this file. Mine for example has the following content:
"Just a dummy file required since Cordova 2.6.0"
create a file cordova_plugins.json that contains {}. then go to cordova-2.7.0.js and comment this line require('cordova/channel').onNativeReady.fire(); then when development done, add it back
Like me if you are using Cordova 5.1.1 and want to access native functionality after redirect then copy cordova.js, cordova_plugins.js and plugins folder which is at \platforms\platform_name\assets\www\ and put them on server, finally reference cordova.js inside your html. After every plugin add make sure to update these files and folder.