go to the previous local html in UIWebView in iOS - html

Question

In my project there are plenty of html files which through anchor links are connected to each other.
All of the html files are shown after selected in a UITableView, by an UIWebView. Once loaded the anchor links work and user can go to the chosen html.
Now the problem arises when want to go back, since whatever i do the back button in the navigation bar takes us to the tableView not the previous html.
How can i add a back button and how do i know that at any given time which html is being seen through UIWebView ?
import UIKit
class DisplayViewController: UIViewController, UIWebViewDelegate {
var articleName = “”
#IBOutlet var webView: UIWebView!
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
functionOfWebView()
}
func functionOfWebView()
{
let URL = Bundle.main.url(forResource: "\(articleName)", withExtension: "html")
let request = NSURLRequest(url: URL! as URL)
webView.loadRequest(request as URLRequest)
}

Answer 1

You can easily achieve this by linking the webView's "goBack" action to a UIButton.
I assume that you are navigating between the html files in the same webView.
From the storyboard, select the webView and then select "Connections Inspector":
Note that there is "goBack" option in the list of "Received Actions"; Drag from its circle to a button:
Now, instead of popping the current ViewController, the button should do the desired functionality to your case (back to the previous webpage in the webview).

Answer 2

In my case i did a VC's property isInitialWebPageLoaded which reflects whether or not webView is loaded from HTML string or not - which implicates that user did tap link or something else happened.
To get know when it happened VC need to conform to UIWebViewDelegate protocol and implement func webView(_ webView: UIWebView, shouldStartLoadWith request: URLRequest, navigationType: UIWebViewNavigationType) -> Bool like that:
func webView(_ webView: UIWebView, shouldStartLoadWith request: URLRequest, navigationType: UIWebViewNavigationType) -> Bool {
isInitialWebPageLoaded = navigationType != .linkClicked
return true
}
After that with every back button action is being invoked i simply check:
if webView.canGoBack {
webView.goBack()
} else if isInitialWebPageLoaded == false {
webView.loadHTMLString(yourHTMLString, baseURL: nil)
} else {
navigationController?.popViewController(animated: true)
}
Hope it helped.

Answer 3

You must to add an unique ID in the HTML and later when go back with "goBack" action parse the html finding the ID .