Question

I’ve opted to use UIWebView so I can control the layout of text I’ve got contained in a local html document in my bundle. I want the text to display within a UIWebView I’ve got contained within my view. So the text isn’t the whole view, just part of it.

Everything runs fine, but when the web page loads I get a blank screen for a second before the text appears. This looks really bad. can anyone give me an example of how to stop this happening? I’m assuming I have to somehow hide the web view until it has fully loaded? Could someone one tell me how to do this?

At the moment I’m calling my code through the viewDidLoad like this:

[myUIWebView loadRequest: [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle]pathForResource:@"localwebpage" ofType:@"html"] isDirectory:NO]]];

Any help is much appreciated. I’ve read round a few forums and not seen a good answer to this question, and it seems like it recurs a lot as an issue for beginners like myself.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post!

UPDATED info
Thanks for your response. The suggestions below solves the problem but creates a new one for me as now when my view loads it is totally hidden until I click on my toggle switch. to understand this it’s maybe most helpful if I post all my code. Before this though let me explain the setup of my view. I’ve got a standard view within which I’ve also got two web views, one on top of the other. each web view contains different text with different styling. the user flicks between views using a toggle switch, which hides/reveals the web views. I’m using the web views because I want to control the style/layout of the text. Below is my full .m code, I can’t figure out where it’s going wrong. My web views are called oxford & harvard I’m sure its something to do with how/when I’m hiding/revealing views. I’ve played around with this but can’t seem to get it right. Maybe my approach is wrong. A bit of advice ironing this out would be really appreciated:

@implementation ReferenceViewController
@synthesize oxford;
@synthesize harvard;

// Implement viewDidLoad to do additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
- (void)viewDidLoad {
[super viewDidLoad];
[oxford loadRequest: [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle]pathForResource:@"Oxford" ofType:@"html"] isDirectory:NO]]];
[harvard loadRequest: [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle]pathForResource:@"Harvard" ofType:@"html"] isDirectory:NO]]];
[oxford setHidden:YES];
[harvard setHidden:YES];

}

- (void)webViewDidFinishLoad:(UIWebView *)webView {
if([webView hidden]) {
    [oxford setHidden:NO];
    [harvard setHidden:NO];
}
}

//Toggle controls for toggle switch in UIView to swap between webviews
- (IBAction)toggleControls:(id)sender {
if ([sender selectedSegmentIndex] == kSwitchesSegmentIndex)
{
    oxford.hidden = NO;
    harvard.hidden = YES;
}
else 
{
    oxford.hidden = YES;
    harvard.hidden = NO;
}
}


- (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning {
// Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview.
[super didReceiveMemoryWarning];

// Release any cached data, images, etc that aren't in use.
}

- (void)viewDidUnload {
[super viewDidUnload];
// Release any retained subviews of the main view.
// e.g. self.myOutlet = nil;
}


- (void)dealloc {
[super dealloc];
[oxford release];
[harvard release];

}


@end

Answer 1

Sure, in your UIViewController‘s designated initializer, set the hidden property of the UIWebView instance to YES:

[webView setHidden:YES];

Then, implement the UIWebViewDelegate method - (void)webViewDidFinishLoad:, and perform an if check inside the method like this:

- (void)webViewDidFinishLoad:(UIWebView *)webView {
   if([webView hidden]) {
      [webView setHidden:NO];
   }
}

Also, don’t forget to specify that your class conforms to the UIWebViewDelegate protocol:

@interface YourViewController : UIViewController <UIWebViewDelegate> {...}