Question

On create of my activity I am firing a loading handler (whilst a spinner is shown), amongst other things in that handler code I call loadURL on three private WebView objects.

The purpose of this is to pre-cache these webpages, each it then shown dependent on a button touch event. The actual loading and displaying is working fine, except that sometimes (can’t see a pattern yet) I (or my testers) get browser choice screen (such as Chrome / Firefox) for no reason.

So my first question is what would cause that, and how to prevent it from happening?

Otherwise how else would you perform the following:

1. Pre-cache the result of three webpages (simple HTML, tables etc with no images).
2. Dependent on a button touch display the result of the webpage in a layout on screen (same layout each time, so when button 2 is touched it’s corresponding webpage replaces the previous one).

Answer 1

Never like answering my own questions, but as the only answer wasn’t relevant to the question.

It seems that the problem was caused by a redirect, the webpage being loaded did not actually have a redirect it it, but the server was performing an internal redirect from a sub-domain. I got around the problem with the following code.

this.wvBasic.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
    private String pendingUrl;

    @Override
    public void onPageStarted(WebView view, String url, Bitmap favicon) {
        if (pendingUrl == null) {
            pendingUrl = url;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void onPageFinished(WebView view, String url) {
        if (!url.equals(pendingUrl)) {
            Log.d(TAG, "Detected HTTP redirect " + pendingUrl + "->" + url);
            pendingUrl = null;
        }
    }
});
this.wvBasic.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(false);