How to set additional wkWebView settings

[timboozle]

I am using Capacitor without Ionic and I want to set additional WKWebView settings like:

• allowsBackForwardNavigationGestures
• allowsLinkPreview
• scrollView.bounces

How would this be possible?

[jcesarmobile]

It's not possible at the moment

[timboozle]

Thanks, so it's not possible at all to set those variables? Or is there a workaround maybe? Sorry, no experience with Swift but would like to have those things in my app

[jcesarmobile]

the only "workaround" is to manually edit the code to set the values you want

[chris-carrington]

Thank you ionic team for all your contributions to the community, allowing the ability to "allowsBackForwardNavigationGestures" would be much appreciated

[mlynch]

Thanks, certainly something we could explore adding down the road

[realityfilter]

On our project we had the need to register a custom url scheme handler. This can only
be done before the webview is initialized. I think one could easily refactor CAPBridgeViewController
to have factory methods for setting up the webview and the webview configuration and make the
class and the factory methods open. Within a subclass CAPBridgeViewController one would be able to override as needed and specify the controller in the main storyboard.

If this is a viable solution I could make a PR for this. In the meantime we swizzle WKWebViewConfiguration.

[macdja38]

What does everyone think of adding a static method that plugins can implement to allow them to modify the WKWebViewConfiguration?

Something like this

    public static override func configureWKWebView(_ configuration: WKWebViewConfiguration) {
        CAPLog.print("Wouldn't it be cool if this got called?")
        configuration.ignoresViewportScaleLimits = true
    }

My only issue would plugins might step on each others toes, but I'm not sure how to possibly get around that.

[jcesarmobile]

since the issue is about the webview settings, those can be changed at any time, and as plugins have a reference to the webview, they can change any of the settings, so I'll just close.

@realityfilter @macdja38 as the WKWebViewConfiguration is a different issue, maybe you should create a new issue about it, or we can just keep @macdja38 PR as reference. Or you can send a separate PR since you mentioned a different idea.

[jcesarmobile]

In capacitor 3 you can use your own WebView, so you can configure it the way you want

for changing values during runtime, better create a plugin of your own that exposes the properties you need

[mb21]

So the recommended way in capacitor 3 is to use a custom ViewController and then implementing the capacitorDidLoad function? And there do something like:

 webview.allowsBackForwardNavigationGestures = true

[jcesarmobile]

It depends on what you want to change, if they are values that can be changed at runtime I recommend creating a plugin that allows to change those values.

[mb21]

Thanks for the reply! We just want to have allowsBackForwardNavigationGestures set to true... and don't want to change it afterwards. What's the reason you recommend doing that as a plugin instead of in capacitorDidLoad? is the plugin-api more stable? I'm a little bit worried of race conditions and such... but maybe there's no reason to?

[wr9]

@mb21 what did you end up doing?

[mb21]

we ended up using a custom ViewController that looks like this:

import UIKit
import Capacitor

class MyViewController: CAPBridgeViewController {
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        webView!.allowsBackForwardNavigationGestures = true
    }
}

[wr9]

@mb21 thank you, much appreciated!

[ionitron-bot]

Thanks for the issue! This issue is being locked to prevent comments that are not relevant to the original issue. If this is still an issue with the latest version of Capacitor, please create a new issue and ensure the template is fully filled out.