Question

In my current project I need my users to be able to scroll over and zoom in on large SVG
Images. A major problem i encountered though, is the limit the android WebView class puts on zooming in and out. Is there any way I can remove or change these limits to my own likings?
The standard zoom controls do not seem to support releasing these boundries.

If my question is unclear, or if I need to elaborate on my question do not hesitate to ask.

Greets,
Wottah

Answer 1

Since no one seems to have come up with a different solution than using reflection – I’m not aware of any alternatives at this point – I wrote up a quick code snippet that illustrates how to bypass the upper limit on the zoom-in action.

Note that the code below will only work on ICS, and possibly Honeycomb, but I currently don’t have a tablet lying around to inspect if the inner workings rely on the same ZoomManager class. Gingerbread, Froyo and Eclair all appear to implement the zooming functionality more or less directly in the WebView class. With the example below it should be fairly easy to add some code to also take those operating systems into account.

// just set an Activity's content view to a single WebView for this test
WebView mWebview = new WebView(this);
setContentView(mWebview);

// retrieve the ZoomManager from the WebView
Class<?> webViewClass = mWebview.getClass();
Field mZoomManagerField = webViewClass.getDeclaredField("mZoomManager");
mZoomManagerField.setAccessible(true);
Object mZoomManagerInstance = mZoomManagerField.get(mWebview);

// modify the "default max zoom scale" value, which controls the upper limit
// and set it to something very large; e.g. Float.MAX_VALUE
Class<?> zoomManagerClass = Class.forName("android.webkit.ZoomManager");
Field mDefaultMaxZoomScaleField = zoomManagerClass.getDeclaredField("mDefaultMaxZoomScale");
mDefaultMaxZoomScaleField.setAccessible(true);
mDefaultMaxZoomScaleField.set(mZoomManagerInstance, Float.MAX_VALUE);