Can I create a Whitelist for Safari using OpenUrl in Xamarin.Forms?

Question

I am working on a project using Xamarin.Forms as a container app. This app includes several webviews that link to restricted web content. One of these links our Sharepoint site. The Sharepoint site has a link that allows our users to go to a 3rd party site(Cornerstone) to view training videos. When using the stock UIWebView, WKWebView, or SFSafariViewController the popup that displays the video is not shown. The only way that I can get this video to play in my app is to use OpenURL to open the Sharepoint site in Safari. The problem is that this is an Enterprise solution where we don't want to allow the employees free reign with the browser.
Is there a way to create a whitelist or to have some control over the searchbar or read the url that they are linking to and block it or redirect the user?

Answer 1

Unfortunately as it's farming out the URL Navigation external to your application there's not a lot you can do from within your app to restrict what they do after the fact, 'openURL' only returns a Boolean value as to it's success, and the only parameters that you can send to it are:

• application - Reference to this application (UIApplication.SharedApplication).

• url - The NSUrl specified by the calling application.

• sourceApplication - The bundle ID of the calling application.

• annotation -Optional property-list data passed by the calling application.

You can only access these if you override the 'openURL' method within your 'AppDelegate.cs' class, there is a set of options you can pass through as an override but again none of those allow you to restrict what the user does after the browser has opened.

If the devices are managed using something like 'meraki' or some other software to control the use of managed devices, then you would likely set up a 'group policy' styled set of restrictions however that's not really a Xamarin issue, and should be discussed with the network administrators.

That being said, I don't see any reason why you can't use the WebView¹, that way you can handle it all within your application. Or alternative utilize custom renderers and pass in the direct video urls and commit to opening up the devices media player for streaming the content².

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¹ Playing videos in WebView

² Using the media manager plugin.