Passing Query String With Index.html file in iOS Phonegap (Cordova)

Hello,

Imagine a scenario that you have Sencha Touch/ jQuery mobile application and you have used Phonegap (Cordova) to compile it to native iOS application.  Now your application expects some params like authentication token, or user id or anything it can be. You need to send this params along with your index.html file so that you can use it in app launch function. Have you ever faced this situation. If yes then here is the solution. Please remember this solution is specifically for iOS Cordova application.

First let's see how normally it works. When you create a Cordova based application in XCode, You have AppDelegate.h and AppDelegate.m file. Open AppDelegate.m file and find a function below.

- (BOOL) application:(UIApplication*)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary*)launchOptions

In this function find the following lines of code.

self.viewController.wwwFolderName = @"www";

self.viewController.startPage = @"index.html";

This specify that web assets folder is WWW and start page is index.html. If you have some other start page you can change the name here. Now if you try to pass query string as follow, it will not work.

self.viewController.startPage = @"index.html?query1=value1";

Because it treats it as page name and there is no such page. So how to resolve this.

First of all remove the start page name from code.

self.viewController.startPage = @"";

Now we will implement NSURL interface and add some custom functions in it to handle the query string. Add following code to your AppDelegate.m file above implementation of AppDelegate

@implementation NSURL (Additions)

- (NSURL *)URLByAppendingQueryString:(NSString *)queryString {

    if (![queryString length]) {

        return self;

    }

    

    NSString *URLString = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%@%@%@", [self absoluteString],

                           [self query] ? @"&" : @"?", queryString];

    NSURL *theURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URLString];

    [URLString release];

    return theURL;

}

@end

This function accepts query string and add it to URL and create new URL. Now add following code at end of didFinishLaunchingWithOptions function.

NSString* newQueryString = @"query1=value1&query2=value2&query3=value3";

NSURL *newurl = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"index" ofType:@"html" inDirectory:@"www"]];

newurl = [newurl URLByAppendingQueryString:newQueryString];

[self.viewController.webView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:newurl]];

Above code will build custom URL with query string and load the URL in iOS webview.

Hope this helps you.