UIWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString does not work second time

Question

Within UITableViewController I have a UIWebView with stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString that is properly loaded the first time. Then the View Controller is dimissed upon user's 'Close', then it could be requested again.

- (void)viewDidLoad {
  textComments.delegate=self;
NSString *path =[[[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath]
               stringByAppendingString:@"/demo.html"];
[textComments loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:path]]];
}

-(void)webViewDidFinishLoad:(UIWebView *)_textComments{
  NSString * html_string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"document.getElementById('editor1').innerHTML='%@';"
                            , self.commentHTML];
  [_textComments stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:html_string];
  [_textComments stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.getElementById('editor1').focus();"];
}

demo.html is an HTML file with a textarea:

<textarea cols="80" id="editor1" name="editor1" rows="8">Content goes
here. ERROR: innerHTML not replaced!</textarea>

The idea is to replace the <textarea> value with the content of the variable self.commentHTML.

The first time the Table View Controller loads, it works fine replacing the value of <textarea> with self.commentHTML variable.

Upon user CLOSE action, another stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString happens to get the innerHTML value and it works fine as well, then I make sure that I dismiss the UIWebView outlet:

[textComments stopLoading];
[textComments removeFromSuperview];
textComments.delegate=nil;
self.textComments=nil;

So far, so good. The problem is when the User launches the View Controller again, UIWebView loads with the pre-loaded demo.html content, but the JavaScript stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString on webViewDidFinishLoad is not happening. I already made sure that webViewDidFinishLoad is being fired. I also made sure that didFailLoadWithError is not being fired also.

Any ideas of why the second time that the View Controller is fired, the stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString is NOT happening?

I'm wondering if I have to destroy/dealloc/discharge something else that I'm not envisioning here upon CLOSE.

Thanks so much for any help.

Edit to Include the full demo.html:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>CKEditor</title>
    <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" />
    <script type="text/javascript" src="ckeditor.js"></script>
</head>
<body><p><textarea cols="80" id="editor1" name="editor1" rows="8">Content goes here. ERROR: innerHTML not replaced!</textarea></p>
</body>
</html>

Have you checked the documentation: (developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/…) or other possibilities (developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/…)? — Darius Miliauskas

emrys57 emrys57 · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-05T07:25:04

There is not enough code here to be sure, but my first guess would be that this sequence creates two separate elements of your dom with <textarea id="editor1"> and that the javascript does execute, but places the content into the wrong textarea.

UIWebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString does not work second time

1 Answers