Intercept and override HTTP requests from WebView

Olegas picture Olegas · Jan 24, 2011 · Viewed 108.3k times · Source

I have a WebView in my application in which some site is opened (always the same, it is my own page). The site has some JS code which loads some images from the remote host.

I want to intercept requests to such images (by URL pattern) and give back my own content (i.e. another image), or leave request untouched depending on internal application logic.

Is it possible to do that?

EDIT: The current state of question...

WebView has an ability to set a WebViewClient (as noted by Axarydax). WebViewClient have two useful methods

  • shouldOverrideUrlLoading
  • onLoadResource

shouldOverrideUrlLoading is able to intercept any url loading, if loading is triggered by page interaction (i.e. link on a page is clicked, WebView.loadURL("") isn't triggering this method). It is also able to cancel URL loading by returning false. This approach isn't usable, cause' it is not able to intercept loading of page resources (and images, what i need to intercept, is such a page resource).

onLoadResource is triggering every time that page resource (and images! thx to jessyjones) are loading, but there is no way to cancel that. That makes this method not suitable for my task also.

Answer

Axarydax picture Axarydax · Jan 26, 2011

Try this, I've used it in a personal wiki-like app:

webView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
    @Override
    public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
        if (url.startsWith("foo://")) {
            // magic
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
});