Embedding online publications in a mobile app

Available_in Bronze Silver Gold ENT

 

Using WebView, you can load your online publications inside a mobile app. WebView is a view that displays web pages, like the online publications, inside your application.


 

Automate publishing

There are two ways to automate the appearance of new publications, without having to release an app update:

  • Group URL. Use the Group Url to automatically load the latest publication.
  • REST API v2  ENT. If you have multiple publications online simultaneously, you can obtain the necessary images, links, titles and dates dynamically from the REST API v2.

Handling external links

Out of the box, WebView does not come with any controls or default configuration. Depending on how you've configured the WebView, clicking on an external link might not respond or open the link outside the app.

In general, there are three ways you can deal with the external links:

  • Block external links. This is not a recommended solution if you're using hotspot icons to indicate their presence on the page.
  • Load external links in WebView as well. This effectively means you're supporting users to browse the internet within your application. If this okay with you, be sure to add additional UI to support this use case (e.g., adding a back-button).
  • Intercept external links and convert them to in-app links ENT. . You can use the Viewer JavaScript API to customize the hotspot interaction and reroute the user to the corresponding in-app pages.

Removing the hamburger (menu) icon

In case you wish to hide the menu option, in the upper left corner of the Reader, you can append the following to the User-Agent of the WebView:

Publitas Web View Integration

For example, if the app is loaded on an iPhone, the updated User-Agent string will look like this:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_0 like Mac OS X)
AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Mobile/15E148
Safari/604.1 Publitas Web View Integration

Hamburger icon on mobile:

icon_on_mobile

Mobile reader without the hamburger icon:
  without_icon