HTML window in AIR app can't open new window

Question

Hi, By allowing HTML content to be displayed inside our AIR app it's possible for our partner organization to write their own custom features hosted on HTML pages at their site, but for their content to appear integrated seamlessly within our AIR app's container so that it looks like it belongs there...
We've successfully got an HTML window within our AIR app that navigates to content in a sub-folder on a web-hosted domain. Content displays correctly and hyperlinks function within the HTML window as we'd expect apart from three scenarios that appear to be manifestations of the same problem:
A hyperlink on a page shown in-app with a link to a PDF stored on the web server has no action
A hyperlink on a page shown in-app with a link to a video file stored on the web server has no action
A hyperlink on a page shown in-app with a link to another site (target="_blank" parameter) has no action
All three hyperlink scenarios work as we'd wish if we navigate to the page in a standard browser.
How can we code the HTML so that we can display selected content in an HTML window inside the AIR app; but have selected hyperlinks invoke the user's standard web browser, or launch Adobe Reader, or play a video file etc?
Note, we understand how to do those things within AIR itself, but can't figure out how to achieve this from inside the HTML window in the app.

Answer 1

Hello,
As to "_blank" links:
this is long-standing lacking feature - as there is no introspection of event of such type - so it goes and could not be prevented. One could either handle all navigation with system browser (all links open in system external browser) or handle them in embedded browser - similar issue is bugging people using phoneGab with jQueryMobile - application eats all external links or none at all). There are solution for that including runtime introspection of DOM object to retrieve all anchor (a) tags in rendered document and attach custom click handler via host object like on complete:
var document:Object = html.htmlLoader.window.document;
if(!document && !document.hasOwnProperty("getElementsByTagName")) return;
var linksArray:Object = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
if(!linksArray) return;
var a:Object = null;
for(var i:Number = 0; i < linksArray.length; i++)
     a = linksArray[i];
     if(a)
          a.onclick = function(event:Object):Boolean
               if(event.target.hasOwnProperty("href") && event.target.hasOwnProperty("target"))
                    if(event.target.target != "_blank") return true;
                    flash.net.navigateToURL(new URLRequest(event.target.href));
               return false;
but if you have control on what content is provided you could take care of handling links depending on runtime feature detection that way in javascript:
<script type="text/javascript">
     function handleClick(a)
          if(!window.runtime) return true;
          if(a.hasAttribute("target") && a.getAttribute("target") == "_blank")
               var href = a.getAttribute("href");
               var req = new window.runtime.flash.net.URLRequest(href);
               if(req) window.runtime.flash.net.navigateToURL(req);
          return false;
</script>
<a     href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/" target="_blank" onclick="handleClick(this);">BBC</a>
<br />
<a href="http://www.google.com/" onclick="handleClick(this);">Google</a>
(above could be scripted globally with help of jQuery for example for all links without much coding).
In 2.7 there is new event introduced to help with introspection so one could prevent event if link is internal and do whatever is expected in application:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/filesystem/File.h tml
If you post some details on how PDF and video content is expected to be shown in html I'm sure someone would share some hints as well,
regards,
Peter Blazejewicz