PhoneGap iOS oAuth redirect failing (NSURLErrorDomain error -999.)

Question

MeteorJS: https://github.com/zeroasterisk/Presenteract

PhoneGap: https://github.com/zeroasterisk/Presenteract-PhoneGap-ios

• I am running a MeteorJS application inside PhoneGap 2.7 on iOS.
• The MeteorJS application is loaded via an external URL, setup in config.xml as the <content src="http://presenteract.meteor.com" />
• I have no problems with oAuth from within a browser
• The access config is setup with a full wildcard <access origin="*" />
• The application works very well, identical to the browser version of it....

But when I attempt oAuth from within PhoneGap, I end up with the following error:

Failed to load webpage with error: The operation couldn’t be completed.
(NSURLErrorDomain error -999.)

(NOTE: oAuth attempts from Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all the same. Loads external site, login proceeds as normal, and upon redirect back to my application's main URL)

I have looked through other StackOverflow reports and done some googeling... The most useful one I found is:

Facebook dialog failed with error: The operation couldn’t be completed. (NSURLErrorDomain error -999.) & Related: NSURLErrorDomain error -999 - links failing in iOS

This seems very promising, but I don't know how to translate this solution into PhoneGap...

I Found the following stub, in <projectname>/Classes/MainViewController.m and I have played with it a bit, but to no solution yet....

- (void) webView:(UIWebView*)theWebView didFailLoadWithError:(NSError*)error
{
    /* (this does log to the console, but doesn't tell me anything different)
    * still: theWebView webView didFailLoadWithError:NSURLErrorDomain -999
    */
    NSLog(@"theWebView webView didFailLoadWithError:%@ %d",error.domain,error.code);

    /* (this is commented out, it didn't seem to do anything for me) */
    if ([error.domain isEqualToString:@"NSURLErrorDomain"] && error.code == -999) {
        NSLog(@"theWebView webView caught the error=-999... but returning void doesn't force the page to reload/continue:%@ %d",error.domain,error.code);
        return;
    }

    /* (this was already here, part of PhoneGap) */
    return [super webView:theWebView didFailLoadWithError:error];
}

I get the second "caught the error=-999" log message, but I end up in a white screen on the app still.

• Perhaps there's some setting somewhere to allow the redirect-back to my application's URL?
• Perhaps I need to force it to reload my app's main page?
• Perhaps I need some more elegant way of catching the error so that it doesn't stop loading?
• Perhaps I need more information about what was causing the failure in the first place?

Answer 1

I hit the same error when I upgraded from Cordova (PhoneGap) 2.2 to 2.7.

Looking at your description, I cannot readily tell if it is the same problem. But, I thought sharing my solution / workaround might help.

The problem I hit was that Cordova 2.7 didn't handle client side redirect during startup correctly.

I also tried to play around MainViewController.m, but I didn't believe the problem can be worked around there.

My solution was to modified CordovaLib/Classes/CDVWebViewDelegate.m to handle the redirect case.

Here is my pull-request:

https://github.com/apache/cordova-ios/pull/57/files