Handle Android Back Button On Phonegap Inappbrowser

I would like to disable or override the Android Back button while I am navigating pages on the InAppBrowser. Can I add an event listener that can handle that? EDIT: Looking at the

Solution 1:

According to the documentation the behaviour of the hardware back button can be configured now for the InAppBrowser:

hardwareback: set to yes to use the hardware back button to navigate backwards through the InAppBrowser's history. If there is no previous page, the InAppBrowser will close. The default value is yes, so you must set it to no if you want the back button to simply close the InAppBrowser.

Thanks to Kris Erickson.

So just update your InAppBrowser plugin if the backward navigation is the desired behaviour.

For more details see: https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-inappbrowser/pull/86

Solution 2:

You can do it quite easily now (as of InAppBrowser version 0.3.3), but you will have to edit the Java files. Go to src/com/org/apache/corodova/inappbrowser directory and edit the InAppBrowserDialog.java:

Change

publicvoidonBackPressed () {
    if (this.inAppBrowser == null) {
        this.dismiss();
    } else {
        // better to go through the in inAppBrowser// because it does a clean up            this.inAppBrowser.closeDialog();           
    }
}

to

public void onBackPressed () {
    if (this.inAppBrowser == null) {
        this.dismiss();
    } else {
        if (this.inAppBrowser.canGoBack()) {
            this.inAppBrowser.goBack();
        }  else {
            this.inAppBrowser.closeDialog();
        }
    }
}

Then go to InAppBrowser and find the goBack function, change:

/**
 * Checks to see if it is possible to go back one page in history, then does so.
 */privatevoidgoBack() {
    if (this.inAppWebView.canGoBack()) {
        this.inAppWebView.goBack();
    }
}

to

/**
 * Checks to see if it is possible to go back one page in history, then does so.
 */publicvoidgoBack() {
    if (this.inAppWebView.canGoBack()) {
        this.inAppWebView.goBack();
    }
}

public boolean canGoBack() {
    returnthis.inAppWebView.canGoBack();
}

And now the hardware back button will go back until there are no more backs to do. I really think this should be the default behavior in android since the Done button already closes the InAppBrowser window.

Solution 3:

This worked for me in PhoneGap 2.7, help came from here, How do I disable Android Back button on one page and change to exit button on every other page

document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);
    functiononDeviceReady() {
        document.addEventListener("backbutton", function (e) {
            e.preventDefault();
        }, false );
}

Solution 4:

I was having this same issue and finally got it to work, I'll post the answer here in case it helps someone.

This is the code I use:

window.new_window = window.open(url, '_blank', 'location=no');

window.new_window.addEventListener("exit", function () {
    window.new_window.close();
});

So the key basically is to attach the exit event, which gets called when the back button of the device is tapped.

BTW, I used cordova.js, and build my apps locally using the Cordova CLI, I don't know if that makes any difference, I mention it just in case.

Solution 5:

EDIT NOTE: As far as I know, it's not possible to override the back-button for the InAppBrowser in PhoneGap. But I did my best searching for possible solutions...

There's an eventListener to override back-button in PhoneGap -doesn't work for InAppBrowser-

functiononDeviceReady(){
    document.addEventListener("backbutton", onBackKeyDown, false);
}

Alternative eventListener to override back-button -the OP said this didn't work either-

var ref = window.open('http://www.stackoverflow.com', '_blank', 'location=yes');
ref.addEventListener("backbutton", function () {
    //logic here
})

Overriding the Back-button in an Activity -this is plain java, obviously didn't work in PhoneGap-

@OverridepublicvoidonBackPressed()
{
   //logic here
}

Conclusion:

Above solutions didn't work, following links (this answer, this one and a third one) didn't help either. So it's highly possible that overriding the back-button for the InAppBrowser in PhoneGap is not possible. If someone does come up with a solution or if things changed for a new PhoneGap version feel free to let us know...

EDIT:

Installing this plugin may take you to closest solution:

cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.inappbrowse

What this plugin will do, in WP8, it will overlay back/forward/close button on InAppBrowser whenever you open any link/page in it.

See this image: