Re: plugin that does not force rendering in a new NSView

FROM : Andrew Harrison
DATE : Mon Jan 14 10:35:10 2008

Hi,

> On 13.01.2008, at 16:11, Andrew Harrison wrote:

>> I've created a plugin based on WebView for handling a particular 
>> mime type. This works fine except, I do not want to render anything 
>> in the browser - I just want to pass the url of the data to an 
>> external application, i.e. I would like the user to click on a 
>> link, and the external app to do its thing. Instead, because I'm 
>> subclassing NSView, the browser moves to a blank page (because I 
>> have nothing to render). Is there anyway to use the facilities of 
>> the WebKit without forcing me to render something?

>
>
> I think you don't need a WebKit plugin for that. From what I heard, 
> you can just specify the URL scheme you want to handle in your app's 
> Info.plist, and then it will be called upon automatically whenever 
> URLs with that particular scheme are encountered.
>

Thanks very much for your response. Indeed, I wrote an app using a 
custom URL scheme and adding the properties to the info.plist. It 
works great. But custom URL schemes should only be used if existing 
URL schemes do not satisfy: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#URI-scheme

HTTP is fine for my purposes. Hence I'm basing locating a local app on 
mime type. You can register mime and file extensions in the info.plist 
as well, but Safari won't open the app by default.

I found a very similar question on the list from over 2(!) years ago: http://lists.apple.com/archives/webkitsdk-dev/2005/Apr/msg00011.html
  Unfortunately the thread fizzled out without a solution.

I would settle for either for the good option - not opening the NSView 
and staying on the site where the user clicked - or the less good 
option - going back to where the user clicked. The former may be 
achievable with some cocoa magic. If I could get hold of the WebView 
containing the previous content on plugin initialization, I might be 
in with a chance as I could return this object to the system. But  I 
can't see how to get hold of another WebView from a WebView. The 
latter is tricky because getting hold of the browser's history seems 
almost impossible from Javascript. For example, Safari seems to create 
a frameset for plugin content. The frame that my content loads into 
contains a source attribute pointing to the url I'm after, but I can't 
get hold of it using usual Javascript techniques.

Thanks,

Andrew